Geolocation tracker

The geolocation tracker was built for the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho, a seven-day event where attendees can bring children. The organisers hire sitters for that week and needed a live picture of where every sitter was at all times.

A third-party tracking application supplied latitude and longitude through its APIs. An Azure edge function pulled those points every five minutes. We stored them in Airtable and kept Supabase as a backup. The pipeline only runs between 6am and 11pm, which is also enforced in Azure, so we are not collecting overnight.

The war-room dashboard turns those points into an interactive heatmap so staff can see sitter distribution in real time. Writing rows to the database was straightforward. Building the heatmap was not - it was new ground and used Leaflet and Mapbox, both open source. Aggregate queries and triggers in Supabase (PostgreSQL) keep the map cheap to refresh while the conference is running.