Engage Map v3

Wayfinding for

Sam Houston State University

• Live at maps.shsu.edu since August 2026
• 11,611 visitors and 38,071 routes in its first 12 weeks, 100% uptime
• 998 of 1,044 commits in the platform repo
• Runs on Microsoft Azure, with a live domain cutover
• A* routing, Smart Tours and AI place search

One platform had to run very different maps for different customers: a university campus and a city. Each needed its own places, routes, events and staff, fully separated, with a map students can actually find their way with.

• Interactive maps with two renderers, MapLibre vector maps and an SVG campus map, with search, categories, saved places, live GPS start point, compass heading beam and 360° rotation
• Routing: A* pathfinding over a walking graph, door-aware building entry and turn-by-turn directions, plus Smart Tours (multi-stop routes with progress tracking)
• AI natural-language place search using an LLM (Groq), answering only from real map data
• Events from SHSU’s Localist API, synced every 15 minutes by Azure Functions, with venues matched to map locations

• Large vector campus maps converted into Deep Zoom WebP tiles (Sharp, OpenSeadragon) so they load and pan smoothly on phones, with tappable buildings, a live-location dot and route lines on top
• 360° virtual building tours, made by linking 360° photos into connected tours
• Augmented-reality points of interest, set up with reference images so the AR system recognises each landmark

• Migrated production from Vercel + Neon + Upstash to Microsoft Azure (App Service, PostgreSQL, Redis Cache, Blob Storage, Key Vault, Container Registry, Functions) and led the live cutover of the university’s domain
• “Build once, deploy many” CI/CD in GitHub Actions: Docker images promoted by digest through dev → staging → production, with approval gates, health checks and automatic rollback
• Each environment isolated with its own database; the production origin locked behind Cloudflare so traffic can’t reach Azure directly

• Led a security remediation: Dependabot alerts from 46 to 0, Next.js 14 → 15 and Node 20 → 22
• Found and fixed an unauthenticated image-optimizer DoS (16 MB responses with no auth) and a broken rate limiter that put every visitor in one shared bucket
• CI guards for SSRF invariants, Node-engine compatibility and npm audit

• A multi-tenant admin console (55+ pages, 141 API routes) where staff manage places, buildings, entrances, walking paths, categories, tours, events and feedback
• Role-based access control with custom roles, tenant-scoped permissions and server-side checks on every admin API, so one tenant’s staff can never see another’s data
• Super-admin tenant management: onboarding and lifecycle, per-tenant feature flags, theming, usage, member invitations, audit logging and Microsoft Entra SSO

• A visual editor that lets non-technical staff style a live vector map: layers, icons, buildings, bounds, overlays and icon sizing by zoom level
• The icon system: brand and category icon library, icon roles (decorative vs clickable), colour tinting and a draft → live place lifecycle
• Multi-area masking: staff draw boundaries with box tools and a point editor, and the geofence, GPS tracking and walking network are clipped to them. Routing refuses trips between disconnected areas, and saves are protected against editors overwriting each other

• A pipeline that imports business and landmark data from Overture Maps into a review queue; staff categorise and publish, and nothing goes public without human approval
• Place matching to fill missing data from Overture: address matches for 118 of 144 New York places, which had only 1 address before
• A Location QA tool: a map-based queue that flags misplaced pins and places not linked to a building

• ~600 Jest and Playwright test files, a local Postgres audit rig for integration testing, and written design docs and deploy runbooks

He is the main engineer on the platform: 998 of 1,044 commits in the repo. It has run the live campus map for Sam Houston State University since 11 August 2026, on Microsoft Azure with the university’s domain cut over live. From launch to 2 November 2026 it served 11,611 unique visitors, 38,071 route requests and 30,783 searches, peaking at 2,165 visitors in the first week of the fall semester, with 100% uptime across 20,055 health checks. About 70% of use is on phones.