Nicholas Ingalls
Geospatial Software Engineer
I'm a Full Stack developer with a focus on geospatial data and solutions.
I have extensive experience working on parts of the entire geospatial stack, from sourcing data,
building reliable and tested data pipelines, to designing and implementing performant REST endpoints
used by thousands of customers and serving millions of requests.
I'm familiar with a wide variety of languages, frameworks, and tools, from python, java,
NodeJS, to more recent languages such as Rust.
Career
Development Seed
January 2020 - Present
Map Data & ML Infrastructure Engineer
At Development Seed I am currently focusing on production deployment infrastructure of models produced
by our ML team. In the past few months, I have been:
Designing and implementing a robust ML inference and storage service for use across our teams and clients
Building out algorithms & command line tools to automate map data creation from both raster and vector sources
Working with our core ML team to further automate & their work
Remote, Bishop, CA
Open Source Data Pipeline & ETL Framework
Co-Founded OpenAddresses, the first project to take on creating a freely licensed, national address data set sourced
from authoritative data. Since its inception the project has expanded to include address data worldwide. It soon
will be expanding even futher to track building, street, and parcel data.
Remote
Geocoding & Geospatial Data Pipelines
As the first full-time search engineer, I designed and built many of the core systems and
architecture that power the Mapbox Search API today. These achievements include:
Designing and implementing an ETL pipleline that cleans, validates, and conflates thousands of disparate data sources into Hecate, our persistent data store
Using datasets produced through machine learning to tag, categorize and improve address data
Introducing algorithmic improvements to our search engine to improve support for different address formats and retrieval accuracy
Remote, Seneca Rocks, WV
Retail Manager & Climbing Guide
Design, build, and implement the custom CMS for scheduling guides, booking, and client management
Manage day to day operations at the Gendarme, including inventory management, sales, & supply.
Seneca Rocks, WV
Geodesy & Geomatics Engineering
My passion for maps and software development led me to be accepted in the University of New Brunswick's
Geodesy & Geomatics program. After two semesters in the program, with encouragement from my advisors,
I accepted an offer at Mapbox, to be the 37th hire, building the future of online mapping.
University of New Brunswick
Software Projects
Hecate
Fast Geospatial Feature Storage API
Hecate powers Mapbox's address editing workflow. It is a fully versioned, multi-user geospatial feature
storage solution that I developed to allow Mapbox to quickly respond to customer feedback, as well as
allowing non-engineers to use familiar editing tools to quickly make changes to our underlying address
data.
Technologies
Rust
Actix Web
Postgres
PostGIS
VueJS
Parcel
CircleCI
AWS RDS
Docker
Carmen
Vector Tile Based Geocoding Engine
Carmen powers the Mapbox Search API. Backed by a custom in-memory index system, and a vector tile based
spatial indexing system, it is designed to be a flexible geospatial search option that supports
a wide variety of datasets.
Technologies
Rust
Neon
Node.JS
Mapbox Vector Tiles
Sqlite3
CircleCI
CodeCov
AWS ELB
Docker
AWS S3
PT2ITP
Address Data Swiss Army Knife
PT2ITP, or Points to Interpolation started as a tool to convert points and a road network
into an interpolation mesh. Calculating the start and end addresses of every block for
every country in our search API. Since it's inception, it has become an open-source
swiss army knife for civic address data. From deduplication, conflation of disparate
datasets, to debugging, PT2TIP does it all.
Technologies
Rust
Neon
Node.JS
TurfJS
PostGIS
Postgres
CircleCI
CodeCov
Spatial Algorithms
Mapbox Search Playground
Interactive Search API Explorer
The Mapbox Seach Playground is an interactive tool that is designed to let our customer
discover all of the different options and parameters of the Mapbox Search API. It has
also become the tool of choice for debugging search queries.
Technologies
JavaScript
VueJS
Parcel
Assembly
CircleCI
CodeCov
Climb Seneca
Stripe Integrated POS & Booking System
The Seneca Rocks Climbing School is the oldest continuing running climbing service on the east coast!
Designed from the ground up to fit the needs of the school, it serves as an avaliability tool
for guides, a client database and event tracker, and an online - stripe integrated booking
and POS system.
Technologies
JavaScript
VueJS
Parcel
Assembly
Postgres
Stripe
Travis CI
Hobbies & Certificates
I bring the same passion & focus that I give to my job, to my hobbies. When I'm not teaching new climbers,
I can be found paddling the many remote rivers of West Virginia or exploring new cave systems with local cavers.
EMT
National Registry of EMTs
Wilderness First Responder
Wilderness Medical Assoc.
Single Pitch Instructor
American Mountain Guiding Assoc.
AIARE 2
American Institute for Avalanche Research & Education
Advanced Swiftwater Rescue Technician
Rescue 3 International
General License
FCC - Amateur Radio
SAR Tech II
NASAR