Find Me, Find the Map

The Instagram story was the invitation. “Find me, you’ll find the way!” pointed toward the person behind the feature instead of handing readers a navigation link. The route was /gideon: finding me in the URL was how you found the map.

The story did not spell out the route. That small gap between the clue and the destination made discovery playful, but it also meant a useful feature could be missed. This was part of the distribution decision, not just a technical gate: the story gave people a reason to look for something the navigation did not reveal.

I considered putting the map in navigation. That would have made a useful feature much easier to find, but it also increased the exposure of an interface whose tile usage I had to account for. Leaving it unbuilt would have avoided that work and left the geographic problem untouched.

The route checked the map flag and redirected to the map page only when it was enabled. Otherwise, it sent the visitor home. This illustrative example shows the decision without exposing the production route or flag names:

const enabled = await isFeatureEnabled("example-feature");
const destination = enabled ? "/example" : "/";

return redirect(destination);

Illustrative pseudocode; names and paths are placeholders, not a production source excerpt.

The actual implementation also checked access at the destination and required authentication. Search metadata kept the page out of ordinary indexing. Those controls served different purposes from the clue itself.

Those choices reduced ordinary discovery. They did not impose a numerical usage limit: someone could share the route, and search metadata was not an access control. The flag and session boundary determined whether the page could be reached; the absence from navigation affected whether someone would find it.

I loaded the activations for the default main event across the available pages, then grouped those with coordinates by latitude and longitude rounded to six decimal places. Several activations at the same venue became one marker with a count, rather than overlapping pins.

Opening that marker showed the activations at the location. A single location centered the view; several locations fitted the map bounds. This made the map useful for comparing the day's possibilities while retaining the individual listings behind each point.

Leaflet loaded on the client. When the sidebar changed the available space, I invalidated the map's size so it could measure the new layout. That detail kept the map aligned with the surrounding interface.