Lakin Wecker, PhD

Calgary-based geospatial intelligence platform processing billions of spatial records in real time, with performance that outpaces traditional systems. Co-founder, former Principal Scientist and CTO. The core indexing technology (bg-core) grew out of PhD research and anchors the platform.

Geospatial indexing library and the core of BigGeo's platform. Built on PhD research, bg-core achieves single-nanosecond performance on many spatial operations and double-digit nanoseconds on others, competitive with or faster than industry standards while introducing significantly less distortion. Primary author and lead.

Real-time geospatial query engine for BigGeo. Shaped the initial design, then solely built and deployed the first complete implementation, including Kubernetes integration and early work on a custom k8s controller. Now owned by a BigGeo team.

Data lake format for geospatial raster data, designed for efficient, byte-targeted querying and processing at scale. Co-designed the approach and led the initial implementation. Further integration and maintenance are now handled by a BigGeo team.

Single-file raster format for geospatial imagery, comparable to GeoTIFF but optimized for data lake use with random access and streaming. The file format underneath strata-r. Co-designed the approach and led the initial build, with ongoing work carried forward by a BigGeo team.

Geospatial search engine for BigGeo. Co-designed the initial approach and built the prototype. A BigGeo team extended it and now owns it.

Tournament management software for the Lichess4545 league. Handles registration, scheduling, pairing generation, and league operations end to end. Started the project and mentored the university student who built most of it, and have been the primary maintainer since.

Tournament management platform for Lichess. Supports knockout formats, invite-code registration, configurable tiebreaks, and self-service team management for captains. A fork of heltour, rebuilt to handle a wider range of tournament types. Primary author and maintainer.

Moderation bot for the Lichess4545 league. Connects Slack to Lichess and the league's tournament site. Joined early to add league management features, later rewrote it in TypeScript and have maintained it for many years.

DDoS mitigation for Lichess, the second largest chess website in the world. Reads rate-limit logs and bans abusive IPs through nftables. Existing tools like fail2ban and CrowdSec could not keep up, so proposed and built the first version as a composable Unix-style tool. Other Lichess contributors have since extended and optimized it, and it has kept up under load.

Free, open-source server for two-player mind sports games, supporting over 30 different games including Chess, Go, Othello, Mancala, and Draughts. Co-founder. Led the initial technical build and continues to contribute across the platform.

Core rules library for PlayStrategy, forked from Lichess's scalachess and heavily refactored to support many two-player strategy games under one API. Led the initial port from Lichess, including the companion lila and lila-ws forks, and brought the initial PlayStrategy site up. Solo-ported the codebase to Scala 3. Since handed off to colleagues for ongoing feature work and maintenance, with training in Scala and functional programming techniques along the way.

A wrapper around Fairy-Stockfish that makes the chess-variant engine usable from higher-level languages. Wraps the C++ core in a clean library API, exposes it to Scala through a JNI binding, and to Rust through a cxx.rs binding. Powers engine play for fairy variants in strategygames and integrates Fairy-Stockfish into fishnet for PlayStrategy. Sole author and maintainer.

Bot-play system for PlayStrategy, built in Scala with cats-effect. Handles matchmaking, game orchestration, and engine coordination so players can challenge bots across the platform's game catalogue. Solo-built, lead maintainer, co-maintained with colleagues.

Puzzle generation system for PlayStrategy, built in Scala with cats-effect. Mines finished games across the platform's game catalogue to produce tactics puzzles for players. Solo-built, lead maintainer, co-maintained with colleagues.

A Calgary-based software studio working with mission-driven organizations across arts, nonprofits, culture, and social impact. Long-term partners to groups like the Calgary Underground Film Festival, Sled Island, Alzheimer Calgary, SaskCulture, and Right To Play. Co-founder.

Simple Web Information Manager. A custom Django-based CMS built in 2008 and maintained since, running roughly a dozen sites for arts organizations and nonprofits across Calgary. Co-ideated with colleagues at Structured Abstraction Inc., led the v2 and v3 implementations, and co-maintained it through the years. Now being sunsetted.

Festival Information Lineup Manager. Used at three Calgary film and music festivals to run lineup programming, scheduling, and attendee tools. Sled Island and the Calgary Underground Film Festival ran on it for years, with CUFF seeing a 400% increase in attendance over their partnership with Structured Abstraction. Now being sunsetted.

Type-safe OpenGL rendering library built for teaching computer graphics. Makes it simple to get models, textures, and lighting on screen with declarative, shader-based OpenGL. Heavy use of C++ templates pushes as many errors as possible to compile time, so when it builds, it generally runs. Grew out of wanting students to spend their effort on the graphics concepts, not on fighting the API. Designed and built v1 solo, then collaborated to harden it for classroom use. Used by every animation class at the University of Calgary for the last seven years.

A sandboxed environment for students and researchers to experiment with various Discrete Global Grid System implementations, including the Disdyakis Triacontahedron DGGS and mesh-based DGGS. Built to make it easy to visualize, compare, and interact with different grid constructions on the sphere.

Geospatial shape registration tool for aligning terrestrial point clouds without requiring in-situ control points. Uses multi-resolution DGGS-based registration to make structure-from-motion monitoring practical in remote and rough terrain.

A collective for passion projects. Things built because we want to, not because we have to.

A lighter touch alternative to Ansible and Kubernetes for running apps on Debian and Ubuntu. Takes a declarative description of what should be running and makes the host match, with ingress, SSL, health checks, and readiness probes built in. Uses podman quadlets and OCI containers under the hood, with a type-safe configuration language in place of YAML. Less general than Ansible, simpler than k8s, with safer configuration than either. A Department of Unnecessary Labour LLC production.

My avatar is a Game of Life simulation. It evolves into a glider - the emblem of the hacker in the original sense: someone who moves freely across languages and projects, solves problems so nobody has to solve them twice, and shares the results openly. Built in Elm.