Design and build the technology stack behind Cleveland Metroparks' public trail-finder map — the primary tool visitors use to navigate 18 reservations and 23,000+ acres of parkland, from trails and facilities to turn-by-turn directions.

Sole developer since 2019 on the Laravel/PostGIS API that serves trail and park data and computes routes across the trail network, and solo architect of a from-scratch React rewrite of the public map, a companion staff content-admin dashboard, and two production ETL pipelines that sync field-survey and county parcel data into the park system's GIS database.

Also carried the public map through a full production cutover from a decade-old jQuery app at the same URL, built a project-wide accessibility contract enforced by automated testing, and layered a job-queue system onto the sync pipelines so staff can trigger a resync from the dashboard even though the production database server accepts no inbound network traffic.

A ground-up React/TypeScript rewrite of the public-facing trail-finder map at maps.clevelandmetroparks.com, replacing a decade-old jQuery application at the same production URL — designed and built solo, including the full production cutover.

Get Directions across four travel modes with routing that prefers the park system's own trail network, client-side full-text search, and a project-wide accessibility contract enforced by automated ESLint and Playwright/axe-core testing gates.

Engineered a two-track URL-state system that separates rapid map-position updates from React Router-driven feature-selection state, a six-provider composition graph with hooks that throw if used outside their provider, and a parallel mobile bottom-sheet UI with iOS safe-area and gesture handling built alongside the desktop sidebar.

Maps Frontend

A Laravel/PostGIS backend built from an empty install in 2019, serving as the data backbone behind Cleveland Metroparks' public trail-finder and directions tools — sole developer and maintainer since, through five major Laravel version upgrades.

Built an in-house, pgRouting-based trail-directions engine that computes routes across the actual trail network graph, plus a full authentication stack (Active Directory, session, and API-token auth) and integrations with Mapbox and Fulcrum.

Response casing is normalized recursively at the API boundary so output stays stable even when derived from legacy, inconsistently-cased GIS tables, and a hard-coded schema check in the test suite guards against accidentally running destructive tests against the production database.

Maps API

A React/TypeScript content-management utility that Metroparks staff use to manage everything shown on the public map — every trail including its hand-drawn route geometry, and more — built and maintained solo since 2022.

Includes an interactive trail-route editor on Mapbox GL Draw, a marker editor with rich-text descriptions and attachments, and a dashboard for monitoring the field-data sync pipeline from Fulcrum.

Absorbed a long chain of major framework upgrades incrementally against a live production tool — Create React App to Vite, Mantine 4 to 8, React 18 to 19, React Router v6 to v7 — and underwent a dedicated security review pass that caught a stored-XSS handoff risk between this app's rich-text editor and the public frontend that renders it.

Maps Admin Utility

Two production ETL pipelines feeding the park system's PostGIS database: a nightly sync of field-collected inspection and survey data from the Fulcrum mobile platform, and a multi-county pipeline pulling parcel and property boundary data from county GIS servers.

The Fulcrum pipeline exposes run history to the staff dashboard and accepts remotely-triggered syncs through a polling queue, since the production database server has no inbound network access; the parcels pipeline uses a single declarative config to onboard each new county.

The Fulcrum pipeline also translates Fulcrum's raw Postgres-dialect API responses — including mapping numeric type codes back to real column types — and isolates failures per table so one bad record never takes down a whole nightly run; the parcels pipeline hardens its fetch layer per county, including anti-scraping headers and request throttling for a more restrictive server.

Cleveland Metroparks

Projects

Maps Frontend

Maps API

Maps Admin Utility

Sync Apps