Alan Thomas
atlight.github.io
Melbourne, Australia
Teaching
I'm an Associate Lecturer (Education Specialist) in the Department of Infrastructure Engineering at the University of Melbourne, undertaking a wide range of teaching roles ranging from face-to-face classroom teaching and lecturing to behind-the-scenes curriculum development work. Recently this has included working with Martin Tomko to deliver the subject Spatial Data Management, for which we maintain a publicly-available subject book.
Prior to taking up this role, I was a sessional tutor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, where I delivered weekly workshops to a diverse range of engineering, IT, maths and science students taking the subjects Engineering Computation and Database Systems.
Wikimedia
The Wikimedia Foundation hosts a range of collaboratively-edited, freely-licensed wiki projects, such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary. Many Foundation staff also contribute to the open-source wiki software MediaWiki. Using the username This, that and the other, or TTO for short, I've become part of the vibrant volunteer community that has sprung up around these projects.
From 2011 to 2020, I developed and maintained For the Common Good, a desktop application which allows Wikimedia users to transfer images and media files from their local wiki to Wikimedia Commons, the central repository. FtCG is no longer maintained, but you can still download the final release and access all FtCG resources on this site.
Other highlights include a spell as one of the core maintainers of Twinkle on English Wikipedia, and more recently, development of English Wiktionary's Todo Lists infrastructure.
Geospatial
For some time I've been undertaking geospatial software development work for ThinkSpatial, including:
- Specialised backend and frontend development on Civillo, a web app that allows users to display and interact with 2D and 3D CAD and GIS data on a map
- Developing a small positioning web app that demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of mobile geolocation and acts as a geodesy teaching tool
- Improving the AutoCAD DXF driver in GDAL, the open-source geospatial data conversion tool; I am now the primary maintainer of this driver
Anyone who is working with DXF data might find these notes useful:
Elsewhere
I hold a Bachelor of Science majoring in geomatics, a Diploma in Mathematical Sciences and a Master of Engineering (Spatial) from the University of Melbourne.
Various intersections between the topics of data, mapping and transport in Victoria can be found at my blog, AT's future of transport.
Contact
Why not send me an email?