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 the National Weather Service's new weather.gov, live now as beta.weather.gov.

   • Scheduled ingestion jobs in Go (cron) 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.
   • Subject matter expert and primary liaison between the beta site, built to serve millions of users, 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.

   • Primary point of contact for LiDAR projects, managing ingestion and evaluation of LiDAR data.
   • Product and workflow demos for prospective customers, technical documentation, and professional services support.
   • 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.
   • Researched, evaluated and onboarded technology partners, with independent trials in LiDAR, point cloud and geospatial work.
3. 2021 to 2022

   TomTom

   Software Engineer II

   Remote, Lebanon, NH office

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

   • 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.
   • Optimized PostgreSQL geospatial structures for a vessel tracking app, served through GeoServer, and modernized its Python GIS code with Shapely, H3 and GDAL.
   • An internal HR app in Python and React that consolidated data from multiple sources.
5. 2019

   The Buffalo Group

   Software Developer, Contractor

   Remote, Reston, VA office

   Full-stack development and GIS lead, with OpenLayers, Leaflet, GDAL, GeoServer and GRASS. Wrote the Docker build scripts for a cloud-agnostic deploy.

   • 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.
   • Sole developer of the mapping component in 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.
   • Diagnosed issues, wrote scripts and logged defects against Esri's APIs for Python, JavaScript, Java and C#.
   • Deployed ArcGIS Enterprise and the ArcGIS API for Python on secure systems for defense clients, and extended their web maps with Web AppBuilder and Esri Leaflet.
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 US, Canada and Mexico, rebuilt each month from Wikipedia. Pick an airport or an airline to see where it flies.

• A monthly Python scraper parses 10 Wikipedia airport lists into 21K+ routes, published to S3 as precomputed JSON, served by Lambda and cached at Cloudflare's edge.
• Each month's routes load as one ~75 KB download and filter in the browser, drawn on an OpenLayers canvas with 1,100+ airports.
• Per-airport and per-country re-scrapes merge into the live snapshot, so a failed page never forces a full rerun.
• All AWS and Cloudflare infrastructure is in Terraform, deployed by GitHub Actions.

Python, React, OpenLayers, ECS Fargate, Lambda, S3, API Gateway, 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.
• MVVM with exhaustive sealed-type error handling, Robolectric and Compose UI tests, and signed APK releases built on each tag.

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, JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL, Java, HTML/CSS

Geospatial

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

Cloud

AWS, Azure (Batch, Databricks), GCP, Cloudflare, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions

Frameworks

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

Databases

PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, SQLite, SQL Server

Systems

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