Tom Shanks

At First Due I move fire and EMS agencies off their old records systems. The first job is working out what the source data actually contains, which is rarely what its documentation claims. From there I map it to our target schema, validate what comes through, and sit with the customer while they check their own records.

Most of that is SQL and Python. I also build Rust tooling, data marts, and automation for QA from first conversations with a client to the final cutover to their new home for their legacy data.

I studied geography at UC Denver, focused on urban planning and disaster resilience. As a graduate research assistant, I worked with principal investigator Esther Sullivan and Andrew Rumbach on geospatial databases and automated workflows for NSF disaster-recovery research. I learned engineering by building the systems the analysis required. The projects on this site run on my own hardware: an ADS-B receiver that has logged over a million aircraft messages and a tree-crown classifier built from free LiDAR and satellite data.