Backend Software Engineer

A backend software engineer working in the Bushfire / GIS Space with 8+ years experience

About Me

I’m a 30 year old software engineer based in South Brisbane, Australia. I graduated from Griffith University with a Bachelor of Software Engineering (Honours) in 2015. I’ve been working professionally as a software engineer since 2015. I’m seeking challenges in the GIS / Bushfire space and am currently working on a contract with FireSight.

Roles

I’m currently developing software for FireSight, a small company providing geospatial bushfire advice to local councils. My role develops Python tools and QGIS plugins to provide utility to FireSight, allowing the analysis and extraction of historical weather, simulation output and satellite imagery, to create in-depth understanding of fire risk.

Previously, I’d been leading the development and architecture of the RedEye Bushfire Platform Convexion, a SaaS platform, which analysed landscape scale risk of bushfire and integrated Phoenix RapidFire, a fire simulation tool, into a web interface hosted in the cloud. This was created with Java, Spring Boot, Python and PostgreSQL.

This was a technically challenging project, which involved large raster datasets including layers from tens to hundreds of billions of pixels. Cloud optimised GeoTiffs, Mapbox vector tiles, Postgis, Leaflet, NetCDF, Python and GDAL are a handful of the technologies we leveraged to provide a responsive browser experience to the user. This project leaned heavily on researching and investigating suitable approaches to large data problems.

I’ve spent the majority of my career developing cloud based multi-tenant Spring Boot Web APIs in Java for the RedEye platform, spanning across three discrete product offerings - Convexion, RedEyeWFM, RedEyeDMS.

Hobbies

Technology has always been my hobby. I’ve enjoyed personal projects, including running a large gaming community maxgamer.org that reached 75,000 registrations (2011-2015), and a handful of Minecraft plugins that were distributed approximately 500,000 times (2012-2015). I’ve developed a playable RuneScape server by reverse engineering the game client which proved to be a fun and exciting challenge (2013-2017). I particularly have enjoyed the interaction with the community that these projects provided.