What It Was#
The WBIDA Mobile Concierge was an internal field operations application built for the Waikiki Business Improvement District Association — the organization responsible for managing and maintaining the Waikiki commercial district in Honolulu. The app was used by WBIDA’s Aloha Ambassadors, the district’s uniformed street-level field staff, as their primary tool for logging activity and reporting issues across the district.
The Aloha Ambassadors program was operated by Block by Block — a national company providing Ambassador services to over 100 Business Improvement Districts across the US. When WBIDA deepened their relationship with Block by Block, the custom Mobile Concierge was eventually superseded by Block by Block’s proprietary SMART System (Statistics Management and Ambassador Reporting Technology), their in-house platform purpose-built for BID Ambassador programs nationwide.
What It Did#
- Activity logging — Ambassadors recorded notes and observations from their patrols across the district
- Maintenance & service requests — field staff submitted requests directly from the street when they identified issues requiring attention
- Dispatch routing — requests were triaged and dispatched to WBIDA’s internal maintenance teams for routine issues, or escalated to the City of Honolulu for larger infrastructure repairs
- Hybrid app running on both iOS and Android from a shared codebase
What I Built#
Designed and delivered the full solution across an eight-year engagement (2012–2020). Initially built on on-premises infrastructure, then migrated progressively to cloud as the platform matured. The back-end evolved from a traditional Ruby on Rails monolith to containerized microservices on Kubernetes.
The longevity of the engagement meant the architecture had to grow — the codebase that shipped in 2012 was significantly different from what was running in 2020, and managing that evolution without disrupting district operations was the core challenge.
Stack: Angular, Ionic Framework, TypeScript / JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, Kubernetes, Docker
Period: 2012–2020
Client: Waikiki Business Improvement District Association (WBIDA)