Tom Shanks

I work on the hard part of moving operational data into a new system. At First Due, I lead migrations of legacy fire and EMS records from source discovery and mapping through validation, customer testing, and production cutover. I use SQL and Python every day, and I built Rust tooling to catch malformed files before they reach the import.

I studied geography at CU 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.

One preflight check caught 916 records at risk of being silently dropped. That is the sort of problem I like working on: finding what a successful import would have missed, then making the check reusable for the next migration.