case study

Perch

Perch is a living 3D civic dashboard for Austin, Texas. It renders the whole city as an interactive isometric map and layers real-time civic data on top of it — weather, traffic, transit, 311, crime, water, power, housing, parks, and more — so a resident can read the state of their city at a glance.

Perch is my own project, and a long time coming: I've wanted to build a real-life SimCity ever since the game consumed my childhood. I came up through web design — fluent in HTML and CSS, lighter on JavaScript — so a full 3D, data-driven app stayed out of reach for years. Claude Code is what finally made it possible. I design and build it end to end, using the AI-assisted workflow (Claude Code and GitHub) I now use daily as a product developer. The immediate spark was Corpus Day Zero, a drought dashboard I built for the Nueces Basin — Perch is that idea scaled to a whole city.

Perch — a 3D isometric civic dashboard of downtown Austin along Lady Bird Lake

WHAT IT IS

The interface is a single, continuous 3D model of Austin. A left rail exposes toggleable data layers — Weather, Traffic, Community (311), Fire/EMS, Crime, Water, Housing & Dev, Power, Nature & Parks, Events, Education, Transit, Flights, Zoning, Demographics, Cameras — plus map controls for labels and trees. A City / State toggle switches the level of government in view.

Rather than a wall of charts, the data lives in context: on the streets, buildings, and waterways where it actually happens. The map is the dashboard.

THE PROBLEM

A city already publishes an enormous amount of data — weather, traffic, 311 requests, water, power, permits, crime — but it lives in dozens of separate agency dashboards and open-data portals, each with its own map, login, and learning curve. Even a motivated resident rarely stitches it together. Perch starts from the opposite premise: one place, one map, everything in context.

DESIGN & BUILD

A few of the decisions behind it:

An isometric 3D model instead of charts. A grid of graphs would have been faster to build, but data reads faster when it sits on the actual street or building it describes. The 3D city is the navigation and the visualization at once.
One unified map with toggleable layers, rather than a separate page per dataset. Layers stack and combine, so you can see traffic, weather, and 311 in the same glance instead of tabbing between tools.
A soft, illustrative art direction — rounded forms and calm color — over the dark "mission-control" look most civic dashboards default to. The goal was something a resident would open for pleasure, not just utility.
Built solo with an AI-assisted workflow. A Vite front end on Mapbox GL, typeset in Inter and JetBrains Mono, pulling live feeds from the City of Austin, TomTom, and the Austin Fire Department — developed with Claude Code and versioned on GitHub.

OUTCOME

Perch was selected to present at Mapbox BUILD 2026, the company's developer conference — recognition from the platform it's built on that the approach is worth showing to other builders. Development is ongoing, with new data layers and cities on the roadmap.

Explore Perch live