Sentinel

The idea

A large amount of genuinely useful data is published free by public agencies and then goes unread because it lives in a dozen separate places, each with its own interface. Sentinel puts the useful parts on one wall and keeps them current.

A deliberate constraint

The whole application is one file. No build step, no package manager, no framework, no dependencies to audit or update. Open it and it runs.

That is not minimalism for its own sake. A dashboard meant to sit on a screen for months should not have a supply chain. Nothing in it can break because a package changed, and it will still work in five years without anyone maintaining it.

Public data only

A firm boundary from the outset: only sources that are already public. Nothing personal, nothing private, nothing scraped from behind a login. Every feed is something a public agency publishes for anyone to read.

That is the difference between a situational-awareness tool and a surveillance tool, and it was worth deciding before writing any code rather than after.

Why it is here

Sentinel is in-house work rather than a client project, and it is on this site because it demonstrates the parts of our approach that a brochure site does not: pulling from live sources, handling feeds that fail or go quiet, rendering continuously without leaking memory, and staying legible as a dense information display.

Most of those problems reappear in client dashboards. This is where they were solved first.