Data & methods ← Live dashboard
I'm a software engineer with twenty years of experience, from enterprise analytics and healthcare platforms to hands-on data engineering and systems work. Salish Ops is one of my independent builds: a live operational-intelligence platform for the Salish Sea ferry network, built from a radio antenna, a set of data collectors, and a stack of public filings.
It's a working system, not a slide deck. Everything on the site is real and collected continuously: an AIS receiver logging ship movements, a poller archiving BC Ferries' live conditions every five minutes, and a derivation job that reconstructs berth-to-berth crossings for the hundred-odd directional terminal pairs with no published times (BC Ferries' feed codes each direction separately, so these are not the 25 designated routes of its filings). That last part is the hard one. AIS is a stream of raw position reports, not crossing records, so departures, arrivals, vessel identity, and terminal events all have to be inferred before a "crossing" exists at all.
Underneath sits a battery of data-integrity checks that flag me the moment a number drifts. It is all stdlib Python, SQLite, and systemd, with a hand-built MapLibre dashboard on top, and it has run unattended since day one on a Raspberry Pi and a home server. The full write-up is in preparation, and the methods behind every figure are on the data & methods page.
Beyond this project, my background spans enterprise analytics, healthcare platforms, and full-stack product development, along with more recent work on local language models. There is more of it, with write-ups and ways to get in touch, on my personal site.
Salish Ops is an independent project by Rich Vickers. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to British Columbia Ferry Services Inc. All data is drawn from public sources; every estimate is labelled and its assumptions are documented. Corrections are welcome.