Alarium — Live 3D Airspace Tracker
Overview
Alarium renders live aircraft over North America in three dimensions — at true altitude, on a purpose-built basemap. It began with a hard constraint: the community ADS-B feed it runs on allows roughly one request per second for the entire application, not per user, so client-side polling breaks at the second visitor. That single limit set the architecture before a screen was drawn — a server-side poller, a persistent process, a two-service split across two hosts — and it set the positioning. Against incumbents with thousands of receivers and satellite coverage, Alarium has one endpoint, so it competes on rendering and interaction rather than data, and is built so that thinness is never the thing you notice.
Highlights
- Made altitude a spatial dimension, not a figure in a panel — every aircraft carries a ground tether, so exaggerated height stays honest and stacked holding patterns become legible.
- Built a dedicated interpolation engine that keeps rendered motion sub-pixel at working zoom (~3m p95 error), where most trackers visibly snap between sparse, out-of-order ADS-B updates. Invisible when it works — which is the point.
- Generated the aircraft geometry procedurally — seven low-poly airframe families plus an animated-rotor helicopter, with bank derived from the coordinated-turn relation and pitch from flight-path angle. The shapes come from physics, not illustration.
- Verified routes instead of trusting them: live track is cross-checked against the filed flight plan and returns one of three verdicts — as-filed, inverted, or conflict — because saying “unknown” beats confidently showing something wrong.
- Kept one source of truth for design — a TypeScript token package emits both the interface CSS variables and the Mapbox basemap, so map and UI cannot drift, and a test fails the build on any undefined variable or hardcoded hex.
- Shipped it end to end — custom domain, TLS, origin policy, rate limiting, abuse controls, transactional email, and privacy-respecting analytics — across 13,800 lines of TypeScript and 242 tests.
Role
Solo — product strategy, design system, interface design, and implementation through to production infrastructure.
Notes
The governing rule of the basemap is that the map is ground and aircraft are figure. The style it started from rendered a cruising jet at 1.02:1 contrast against a motorway — effectively invisible — so roads became structure, the accent was reserved for runways, and the coastline earned its own stroke. The register is instrumentation rather than dashboard, closer to Anduril or CHAOS Industries than a consumer map, down to a boot sequence that sweeps like an ATC radar at one revolution every eleven seconds — any quicker and it reads as a loading spinner. An adversarial review later found three real defects that 127 passing tests had missed: each component was correct in isolation, the composition was not — the worst mispredicted every turn entry for about four seconds, and fixing it improved accuracy roughly seventyfold while cutting bandwidth 20%. It stays deliberately iterative: coverage stops at North America, aircraft without ADS-B never appear, and the single-machine poller is a chosen point of failure, because scaling it horizontally would divide the very rate limit that shaped the system.
Tools
TypeScript 7 (strict), Vitest, pnpm workspaces, Vercel, Fly.io, Mapbox Studio, Resend, Matomo, Oxanium / Inter / JetBrains Mono
Framework
Next.js 16, React 19, Turbo
Library
deck.gl 9.3, Mapbox GL JS 3.27, ws, Zod
Alarium — Live 3D Airspace Tracker
Overview
Alarium renders live aircraft over North America in three dimensions — at true altitude, on a purpose-built basemap. It began with a hard constraint: the community ADS-B feed it runs on allows roughly one request per second for the entire application, not per user, so client-side polling breaks at the second visitor. That single limit set the architecture before a screen was drawn — a server-side poller, a persistent process, a two-service split across two hosts — and it set the positioning. Against incumbents with thousands of receivers and satellite coverage, Alarium has one endpoint, so it competes on rendering and interaction rather than data, and is built so that thinness is never the thing you notice.
Highlights
- Made altitude a spatial dimension, not a figure in a panel — every aircraft carries a ground tether, so exaggerated height stays honest and stacked holding patterns become legible.
- Built a dedicated interpolation engine that keeps rendered motion sub-pixel at working zoom (~3m p95 error), where most trackers visibly snap between sparse, out-of-order ADS-B updates. Invisible when it works — which is the point.
- Generated the aircraft geometry procedurally — seven low-poly airframe families plus an animated-rotor helicopter, with bank derived from the coordinated-turn relation and pitch from flight-path angle. The shapes come from physics, not illustration.
- Verified routes instead of trusting them: live track is cross-checked against the filed flight plan and returns one of three verdicts — as-filed, inverted, or conflict — because saying “unknown” beats confidently showing something wrong.
- Kept one source of truth for design — a TypeScript token package emits both the interface CSS variables and the Mapbox basemap, so map and UI cannot drift, and a test fails the build on any undefined variable or hardcoded hex.
- Shipped it end to end — custom domain, TLS, origin policy, rate limiting, abuse controls, transactional email, and privacy-respecting analytics — across 13,800 lines of TypeScript and 242 tests.
Role
Solo — product strategy, design system, interface design, and implementation through to production infrastructure.
Notes
The governing rule of the basemap is that the map is ground and aircraft are figure. The style it started from rendered a cruising jet at 1.02:1 contrast against a motorway — effectively invisible — so roads became structure, the accent was reserved for runways, and the coastline earned its own stroke. The register is instrumentation rather than dashboard, closer to Anduril or CHAOS Industries than a consumer map, down to a boot sequence that sweeps like an ATC radar at one revolution every eleven seconds — any quicker and it reads as a loading spinner. An adversarial review later found three real defects that 127 passing tests had missed: each component was correct in isolation, the composition was not — the worst mispredicted every turn entry for about four seconds, and fixing it improved accuracy roughly seventyfold while cutting bandwidth 20%. It stays deliberately iterative: coverage stops at North America, aircraft without ADS-B never appear, and the single-machine poller is a chosen point of failure, because scaling it horizontally would divide the very rate limit that shaped the system.
Tools
TypeScript 7 (strict), Vitest, pnpm workspaces, Vercel, Fly.io, Mapbox Studio, Resend, Matomo, Oxanium / Inter / JetBrains Mono
Framework
Next.js 16, React 19, Turbo
Library
deck.gl 9.3, Mapbox GL JS 3.27, ws, Zod
