Parcel Tracker

Parcel Tracker is a web application used to track and visualize package tracking info from a variety of supported couriers in one central location.

Tech Stack

The motivation for this project came about when I was reading a developer newsletter and saw something about this Package Place API which provided the data for various carriers, normalized into a shared structure. Curious if I could use my skills in GIS and frontend development to visualize this API, I built this little app.

The project started in Svelte (remnants of that codebase still exist here), as I was keen to learn something new. But the framework wasn't behaving in the way I expected it to (skill issue, probably), so I pivoted to what I was familiar with: React with MobX for state management.

For the geospatial component of this project, I used deck.gl and react-map-gl for the map visualization, with TurfJS for computation of the geometries between the points on the map.

Features

3D navigation

To best visualize the journey packages go on, without knowing the specific routing information, I opted to use arcs to point out each stop in the returned response. We forward-geocode the result to convert the address into raw latitude and longitude to display, which isn't perfect, but gives us a decent approximation of where the parcel is at.

Interactivity

I wanted the tool to be fun and interactive to use, so you can click on items from the side panel to fly between the stops along the path of the arc