Side project · 2026
God's Eye View, pointed at Alaska freight
A live 3D globe of aircraft and ships, set up to answer one question: can we watch freight move to rural Alaska in real time?
The company ships groceries and goods to village stores by bypass mail and barge, and once freight leaves the warehouse it mostly goes quiet. I took God's Eye View, an open-source CesiumJS globe by Bilawal Sidhu, and stood it up as an internal lab to find out how much of that journey public data can actually show.
What I built
- A hardened home for it. Moved it from a test VM to a locked-down Linux container: an unprivileged service account, a firewall in both directions, API keys pulled from a secrets vault at boot rather than kept in the code, and pinned weekly updates that stop if a new dependency appears.
- Company sign-in. Put it behind single sign-on so any employee can open it and nobody outside can.
- An "Ask Claude" panel. Staff drive the map in plain English. "Show freight in the air over Alaska" lists live cargo flights by carrier and nearest village, and the camera follows.
- The coverage map nobody had. Measured where tracking data exists. Bush cargo planes show up well, even over the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Ship tracking goes almost dark west of Bethel, because barges don't transmit and only some tugs do.
What came of it
I demoed it at the company's weekly AI office hours. The data answered the business question better than a guess would have: air legs can be watched today, barges can't without paid receivers, and for bypass mail the more practical route is the carrier's own public order lookup.
- CesiumJS
- Linux containers
- nftables
- systemd
- Single sign-on
- Secrets vault
- ADS-B and AIS data
- Claude