When maps are mission-critical: How Watch Duty powers wildfire safety with Mapbox
summary
A wildfire alert app explains how a volunteer-led team scaled to 7M installs and 18M uniques by moving from Leaflet/MapLibre and S3 tiles to Mapbox, Postgres + vector tileserver, and Fastly so map content can update under a second; a Capacitor webview ships the web Mapbox client on mobile, aircraft are animated HTML overlays rather than style animations, and the map now renders about 300 layers — infrastructure hits 100k QPS bursts with ~90–95% cache hit.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction and welcome
- 1:46Watch Duty mission overview
- 5:21Key app features and map use
- 8:56Balancing dense info and usability
- 16:21Technical geospatial infrastructure
- 24:41Volunteer-led technical design
- 30:01Future roadmap and innovations
- 33:14Q&A session begins
- 46:18How to get involved
- 47:24Closing remarks and thanks
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