Northwind Atlas

Northwind’s dispatch team was running routes from a paper board and a radio. Atlas gives them a live map instead, but the real work was deciding what not to show.

Early versions tried to surface every signal — speed, fuel, delay risk, customer notes — at once, and dispatchers said it felt like staring at a cockpit. I cut the default view down to position, route, and a single delay indicator, with everything else available on click.

Notable details

• Custom marker clustering so the map stays legible at fleet scale
• A keyboard-first command palette for dispatchers who don’t want to touch the mouse
• Offline-tolerant state, since depot wifi drops constantly

Built with React and Mapbox GL, with a small Node service translating raw GPS pings into the simplified events the frontend actually needs.