rhea group
software engineer · oxford · february 2018 to january 2019.
impact
- an early warning system that tells uganda’s farmers and its agricultural industry when drought or flood is coming. the european space agency funded the programme at £127 million.
- its backend, spearheaded on a team of five. 114 gb of geospatial data a month through go pipelines. weather sources at 4 gb/s. maps on the screen in 25 ms.
the organisation
rhea group is a professional engineering company headquartered in belgium. it has supported over 120 space missions for the european space agency, eumetsat and the european commission. the drought and flood management system was its earth observation work for uganda. a trade article on my next move, in april 2019, records the project and its funding.
what i did
the go pipelines. python etl for 4-dimensional image pyramids. an elixir web-socket api for the map visualisations, and bespoke interfaces to profile the beam. the untested java etl rewritten. golang, elixir, kafka, nifi, kubernetes, postgresql.
what it meant
i owned a backend with real stakeholders and real expectations. i came out knowing satellite and geospatial networks and systems in and out.
sources
- prolific north, new hires for oakland group’s data and analytics team, april 2019: “dempsey-leach joins from the rhea group, where he was part of a team working on a £127m project funded by the european space agency.”
- rhea group.