Winston Hoyle

Where I've Worked

1. 2025 to now

   Ad Hoc

   Staff Software Engineer, Contractor

   Remote, Silver Spring, MD office

   Lead the componentization and scaling of interactive maps for beta.weather.gov, the National Weather Service's next-generation site.

   • Scheduled ingestion jobs in Go for large weather datasets on recurring update cycles.
   • Interactive maps for state, county and point forecast pages.
   • Schemas and migrations for geographic and large gridded weather data.
   • Primary liaison between the beta site and api.weather.gov, a public API with millions of users.
2. 2022 to 2024

   iMerit

   Solutions Engineer

   Remote, New Orleans, LA office

   Led LiDAR annotation projects for government, geospatial and autonomous vehicle customers.

   • Customer workflows in Python on AWS (SageMaker, ECS, ECR, Lambda): mask generation, dataset configuration, ingestion and export APIs.
   • A Python REST API for timekeeping and a QGIS plugin for annotation analytics.
   • Independent trials of LiDAR, point cloud and geospatial partners to guide partnership decisions.
3. 2021 to 2022

   TomTom

   Software Engineer II

   Remote, Lebanon, NH office

   Geospatial and infrastructure work for next-generation traffic services and an OpenStreetMap application on Azure.

   • Cut a pipeline from 22 hours to under 2, saving thousands of dollars a day.
   • Generated roads from GPS traces: Python algorithms to aggregate traces into road geometry, with horizontally scaled map tiling.
   • Moved geospatial Python to Kubernetes and Azure Batch, and wrote Spark jobs in Databricks over traffic data.
4. 2020 to 2021

   Maxar Technologies

   Software Developer, Contractor

   Remote, Arlington, VA office

   Full-stack software for government satellite programs.

   • Led the backend of a Bayesian modeling web app in Python and FastAPI on AWS.
   • Designed the PostgreSQL, PostGIS and Elasticsearch architecture behind an Apache NiFi news pipeline.
   • Modernized vessel tracking GIS code with Shapely, H3 and GDAL, served through GeoServer.
5. 2019

   The Buffalo Group

   Software Developer, Contractor

   Remote, Reston, VA office

   Led GIS development with OpenLayers, Leaflet, GDAL, GeoServer and GRASS.

   • Command-line GIS tools exposed as REST endpoints in Python and FastAPI.
   • Microservices backend for a terrain modeling app: GRASS, GDAL, Nameko, Flask and RabbitMQ in Docker.
   • Built the mapping component of the React frontend.
6. 2018 to 2019

   Esri

   ArcGIS Analyst

   Remote, Vienna, VA office

   Resolved issues on enterprise GIS servers across AWS, Azure, SQL Server and PostgreSQL.

   • Python subject matter expert. Wrote internal and public articles on Python availability.
   • Deployed ArcGIS Enterprise on secure systems for defense clients.
7. Education

   George Mason University

   B.S. in Geography

   Minor in Computational and Data Sciences.

What I Build on My Own Time

Flight Atlas

Every direct flight route between airports in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, rebuilt each month from Wikipedia. Pick an airport or an airline to see where it flies.

• A monthly scraper publishes each month as precomputed JSON on S3, served by Lambda and cached at Cloudflare's edge.
• Replacing an Athena and DynamoDB query layer cut route loads from about 4 seconds to one ~75 KB download per month.
• All AWS and Cloudflare infrastructure is Terraform, deployed by GitHub Actions.

Python, React, OpenLayers, Lambda, S3, Terraform, Cloudflare Pages

Open flightatlas.ioSource code

Practice Speaking

An Android app for practicing a language out loud. An AI tutor answers by voice and underlines your grammar mistakes. It covers Russian, French, Portuguese, German and Spanish.

• Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini sit behind one provider interface and one contract test suite.
• Speech, search and key storage all run on the phone, so the app needs no backend or account.

Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, Android Keystore, GitHub Actions

Download the APKSource code

WMATA Fares

Pick a DC Metro station and every other station is colored by what the trip costs, at peak, off-peak or reduced fares. Presented at a WMATA mapping and transit meetup.

• Fares come from the WMATA API and Open Data DC, stored in S3 and served by one Lambda behind API Gateway.
• Terraform covers AWS and Cloudflare, and GitHub Actions tests and deploys on every push.

Python, TypeScript, React, Leaflet, Lambda, Terraform, Cloudflare Pages

Open wmatafares.comSource code

Income by Census Tract

About 4,700 tracts in Massachusetts and Los Angeles, colored by median income, mean income or income bracket from the 2024 American Community Survey.

• A GeoPandas pipeline joins Census table S1901 to TIGER/Line shapes and simplifies them to about 5 m.
• The map is one static page on Leaflet's canvas renderer, with no build step.

Python, GeoPandas, Census API, Leaflet, GitHub Pages

Open the mapSource code

Tools

Languages

Python, Go, Kotlin, TypeScript, SQL, Java

Geospatial

PostGIS, GDAL, GeoServer, QGIS, GRASS, Leaflet, OpenLayers, GeoPandas, Shapely, H3, ArcGIS Enterprise

Cloud

AWS, Azure, GCP, Cloudflare, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions

Frameworks

FastAPI, Flask, Nameko, React, Node.js, Jetpack Compose, Spark

Databases

PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, Athena, SQLite, SQL Server

Systems

Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS), Windows, Android