Sentinel Bird

Earlier this year I ran a small experiment called the Geospatial Launchpad — six weeks of working closely with a couple of people to help them push their geospatial projects forward. West was one of them.

His project is Sentinel Bird (sentinelbird.com): an archive of every Sentinel-2 visit over the Gaza Strip since 2015, with 10-meter resolution imagery for each district, interactive comparison sliders, change-over-time timelapses, and a downloadable press pack — all free, no accounts, no paywall, licensed for anyone to use for anything.

In this conversation, we get into what Sentinel Bird is, why West built it, and everything he ran into along the way — the marketing, the SEO, the feedback, all the stuff that has nothing to do with the tech but everything to do with whether a project actually goes anywhere.

We talk about:

How frustration with English-language media coverage after October 7th turned into a geospatial side project

The foundation models West is training on Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical data for damage detection

Making the pipeline location-agnostic, and why tiling across orbital passes is harder than it looks

"The agenda is in the data" — building something opinionated without saying a word

Why URL structure is the thing you should think hardest about before you hit publish the first time

Watching a real human use your site, and how humbling that is

Using AI to audit your own site — what was useful, and what advice to ignore

The ethics of monetizing a project you'll never put behind a paywall