Chris Whong is a Senior Developer Evangelist at Mapbox and an educator who blends 11+ years of hands-on engineering with product and civic-tech leadership. He builds and ships web mapping and data visualization tools, contributed EV-routing and directions enhancements to the Mapbox JS SDK, and has implemented animated Mapbox GL visualizations and editor UX improvements in well-known open-source projects like geojson.io. Previously he founded and led NYC Planning Labs, delivering APIs, mapping apps, and data access tools for municipal government, and later ran product and outreach at data-focused startups. As an adjunct professor at NYU Wagner he teaches web mapping and spatial analysis, preparing planners to use open data, R/Python, and Mapbox GL. He combines a planner’s understanding of urban systems with developer-level fluency in frontend mapping, open source, and civic data workflows. Based in New York, he’s equally comfortable debugging a directions API, encoding video on the frontend, or advising on open-government data strategy.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Urban Planning, Environment, Transportation and Infrastructure, Master of Urban Planning, Environment, Transportation and Infrastructure at New York University
A quick, simple tool for creating, viewing, and sharing spatial data
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Contributions:49 reviews, 153 commits, 119 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Chris's commits primarily focused on front-end development tasks within the geojson.io project. Their contributions included the addition of a top navigation bar, implementing code formatting for JSON pasted into the editor, and adding the ability to draw rectangle and circle polygons. Furthermore, the user refactored UI elements, including a style switch, and updated the styling of the map's visual features.
A JavaScript client to Mapbox services, supporting Node, browsers, and React Native
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Contributions:1 review, 19 commits, 18 PRs in 1 month
Contributions summary:Chris made several key contributions related to the directions service within the Mapbox SDK. They added parameters for electric vehicle routing, including charge levels, connector types, and energy consumption, extending the functionality of the directions API. Furthermore, the user updated the code to include annotations values and missing API parameters in the request, improving the API's capabilities. The commits also included fixes to the test suite, showing a focus on maintaining code quality and addressing potential bugs in the client library.
reactjavascript-clientmapboxreact-nativebrowsers
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Chris Whong - Senior Developer Evangelist at Mapbox