Tom Macwright
Co-Founder at Val Town
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTom Macwright is a seasoned product-focused engineer and founder with 14 years building developer tooling, mapping platforms, and collaborative web apps from prototype to production. Based in New York, he co-founded Val Town after leading engineering and product efforts at Observable and helping found Mapbox, where he worked on TileMill, iD, Mapbox Studio and shaped open source policy. He spans the full stack—client-side UI, build tooling, and back-end systems—and is comfortable shipping pragmatic fixes (build systems, parsers, and style engines) as well as designing UX. A prolific open-source contributor, his work touches high-profile geospatial projects (Mapbox, Leaflet, Turf) and influential libraries like Zod and CodeMirror, often improving performance, build tooling and developer-facing docs. Colleagues describe him as someone who loves the interplay of product, company and code—he’ll prototype features, write the docs, and own the consequences. Unexpectedly, his contributions range from low-level Mapnik tweaks to polishing Markdown syntax highlighting and CLI utilities, showing both systems depth and attention to detail.
14 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science at William & Mary
English
Stackoverflow
11,664reputation
828kreached
344answers
10questions
javascript
top-5%
leaflet
top-1%
dictionary
top-5%
Github Skills (124)
kml10
python10
mapbox-gl10
testing10
plugin-development10
geojson10
integrations10
render10
mappings10
validating10
deep-learning10
cplus10
imagery10
wkt10
cpp10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
mapbox/shp-write
Sep 2013 - Dec 2016
create and write to shapefiles in pure javascript
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:66 commits, 14 PRs, 35 pushes in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily refactored and implemented functionality related to writing shapefiles in JavaScript. They modified the core `write.js` file, splitting functionality into modular components. The user added support for different geometry types like polygons and polylines. They also integrated the ability to include DBF (database) information, including field inference and data structure.
javascriptpure-javascriptshapefiles
mapbox/leaflet-image
Aug 2013 - Jan 2017
leaflet maps to images
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:63 commits, 10 PRs, 36 pushes in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to the front-end aspects of the `leaflet-image` project. Their work involved implementing and fixing the rendering of map markers, including adjusting image sizes and improving icon placement. They also addressed the handling of tile layers and made improvements to the rendering process. The user's contributions ensure proper image generation from Leaflet maps, covering a variety of map elements.
leafletreact-leafletleaflet-mapsmapboxmap
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