Tom Hughes
Software Engineer at Cyberscience Corporation
Hoddesdon, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTom Hughes is a seasoned software engineer with 27 years of experience, based in Hoddesdon, England, and a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Warwick. He brings deep expertise in back-end systems, mapping and geospatial tooling, and native bindings—having contributed significant fixes and feature support to projects like Mapnik, node-mapnik, openstreetmap renderers, and the widely used Wireshark dissector for IAX2. Tom combines low-level C/C++ and system integration skills with front-end mapping work (Leaflet, OpenLayers, iD), and a strong emphasis on test automation and robustness. His open-source contributions show a pattern of improving stability, compatibility across platforms and versions, and real-world reliability (e.g., renderd reconnection, Postgres exporters, and sqlite3/libuv updates). Known for pragmatic fixes that prevent subtle runtime errors (memory and threading issues), he quietly strengthens infrastructure that many mapping and networking tools rely on.
27 years of coding experience
BSc, Computer Science, BSc, Computer Science at University of Warwick
Stackoverflow
9,040reputation
816kreached
103answers
0questions
unix
top-5%
linux
top-1%
bash
top-5%
elf
top-5%
postgresql
top-5%
linker
top-5%
Github Skills (77)
postgresql10
multithreading10
testing10
c1110
ruby10
c1710
mappings10
libuv10
network-protocol10
activerecord10
threaded10
javascript10
async10
linux10
editor10
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
openstreetmap/mod_tile
Feb 2008 - Aug 2021
Renders map tiles with mapnik and serves them using apache
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 12 commits, 9 PRs in 13 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Tom focused on improving the stability and functionality of the rendering daemon for map tiles. Their contributions include implementing a condition variable for thread synchronization, adding the ability to specify a timestamp for rendering, and addressing CORS-related issues. They also improved the system's resilience by making the render_list reconnect to the renderd process if the connection is lost and retrying failed commands. These changes enhanced the efficiency, flexibility, and reliability of the tile rendering service.
map-tilesmap-editortilemapapacheserves
composite-primary-keys/composite_primary_keys
Mar 2011 - Feb 2018
Composite Primary Keys support for Active Record
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits, 1 PR, 3 comments in 6 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily focused on enhancing the `composite-primary-keys/composite_primary_keys` library, which supports composite primary keys in Active Record. Their commits addressed several issues and incorporated changes to improve the library's compatibility with different versions of Rails and database systems, including Oracle, MySQL, DB2, SQLite, PostgreSQL. Key contributions included fixes related to polymorphic associations, handling of 'id' attributes in composite keys, and updating internal methods to align with Rails API changes, along with providing test cases.
railsrubykeysactive-recordcomposite
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