Sample data

Hi Cory, Mathias and the Geocodio team

My name is Ryan, and I’m a designer, front-end guy, and customer-facing product manager… sort of a web generalist.

I had the chance to meet Cory and Mathias at Laracon in Boston. We chatted briefly, and it was great to hear about some of the other things Geocodio can do, the brand direction, and the simplicity of Geocodio.

In addition to the normal application I filled out on the site, I wanted to use this interactive page to tell a bit more about my story, and how I arrived at this place in my career.

Always learning new things

I’ve been tinkering, building and learning programming, web design and UI/UX since about 2011.

Back then I would lock myself in the library or the bookstore to read the free books on Python, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript — even Lisp. Learning new languages and how the web works has always been a hobby first and foremost.

Writing code just fascinated me. So much so that I was pulled in many, many different directions. Eventually I was drawn towards the front end: I wanted to design experiences with CSS and JavaScript that were simple, but enjoyable.

One of their first outside hires

The bulk of my professional experience is with one company in the Austin area, building a cloud-connected school bus — all on one platform.

I was lucky enough to be one of their first outside hires, where I was able to help the company grow by wearing many hats:

  • Technical support
  • Customer success & training
  • Front-end design & development
  • Product management

I interfaced with customers daily. I sat with our backend engineers to correct issues going on with the system, shape the direction of our product, and really wear lots of hats. I dug deep into errors on our website, errors on our Android app, customer issues and customer feedback.

I tried to increase the feedback loop in the time leading up to releasing new features, in a growing industry and a growing market. It was super challenging, but very rewarding.

A unifying theory of all our products

Eventually I moved to a design role, where I was the sole product designer.

My role was to build out a complete design system, or a standard experience for all of our products. This was to help speed up development, and to improve the front-end polish and craft of our application on the web and on Android.

With that came a lot of map interactions: map corrections and improvements. I was one of the people spearheading the routing application that our company built, and with that we relied a lot on geocoding student information.

I learn things by building them

I wanted to get familiar with Laravel, QGIS and the Geocodio API. So I built a small tool for Mapleville Unified School District — a parent types in their address and gets back their child’s school, and their bus ride.

Step 1

The first thing I did was source all of the school boundary data from the NCES School Attendance Boundary Survey.

Step 2

Then I brought the shapefile into QGIS to see what was actually in it: 139 elementary attendance zones, one polygon per school.

Step 3

I exported the data into GeoJSON format, and then asked Claude Code for some help wiring it up to our Mapbox map inside this app.

…and now we have school boundaries!

But we need some sample student data to work with.

  1. Ask Claude Code to generate some sample student data for us to use

Now let’s geocode!

Now we need to run this through Geocodio to place them on the map.

Our sample student data has the address fields separated out cleanly in columns, so we can run our address through Geocodio using individual components, or ‘component geocoding’.

POST /v2/geocode — example API call
street
4339 Americana Dr
city
Annandale
state_province
VA
postal_code
22003

Geocoding complete!

Now parents can start searching for their bus route assignments.

In our demo scenario, a parent enters their child’s student ID, grade and date of birth, and we return:

  1. Their assigned school
  2. Their nearest bus stop and route

Address and bus stop found!

Our application located the student’s home, then found the nearest morning bus stop.

The address falls in the Annandale Terrace Elementary school boundary, so we have everything we need to build the morning trip plan for the student.

  1. 0.14 miles on foot — about a 3 minute walk
  2. 1.35 miles on the bus — about 6 minutes
  3. Arrive at school at 7:36 AM

I’d love to work for Geocodio. Building with maps is a hobby of mine, and I’d love to help others get the best out of Geocodio in their products. Here are a few reasons why I’d be a great fit for the Technical Support Engineer role:

  1. I do my best work in a small team, where I have the freedom to think, be creative, and work with a founder’s mindset to move the entire business forward.
  2. My curiosity drives my learning and problem solving. I love learning new things quickly, using any resource available to me.
  3. I miss working directly with users. Unblocking somebody’s day is the part of the job I want back.