Sentinel

Published, and then unread.

Public agencies publish a great deal of useful data at no charge, and most of it goes unread because it sits in a dozen separate places, each with its own interface. Sentinel puts the useful parts on one screen and keeps them current.

One file, nothing to update.

The whole application is one file. No build step, no package manager, no framework to keep up with. Open it and it runs.

That is not a style choice. A screen meant to run in a room for months should not depend on code that other people keep changing. Nothing in it breaks because a package was updated somewhere else, and it still runs in five years with nobody maintaining it.

Public data only.

One boundary, fixed at the start: only sources that are already public. Nothing personal, nothing private, nothing taken from behind a login. Every feed is something a public agency publishes for anyone to read.

That is the difference between a screen that watches conditions and a screen that watches people. Deciding it first is what makes it hold.

Why it is here.

Sentinel is in-house work, not a client project. It is on this site because it shows the parts of the work a brochure site cannot: pulling from live public sources, holding steady when a feed fails or goes quiet, running for weeks without slowing down, and staying readable when the screen is dense with numbers.

The same problems turn up in client dashboards. This is where they were solved first.