Case study
Making autonomous-driving telemetry visible, fast, and debuggable
Zenseact (Volvo Cars)Role: Senior Frontend Developer
Context
Zenseact develops autonomous-driving software for Volvo Cars. Validating AD behavior means replaying and inspecting enormous volumes of scenario data — every candidate software version, against every driving scenario that matters.
The problem
High-frequency telemetry overwhelms conventional web rendering. Charts freeze, browsers run out of memory, and engineers fall back to slow offline analysis. The frontend had to sustain smooth interaction over dense, streaming data — or the validation workflow itself became the bottleneck.
Constraints
- Data rates far beyond what DOM-based charting survives
- Engineering users who need precision and trust in what they see, not dashboards that approximate
- Tight coupling to backend and hardware-in-the-loop testing pipelines
- Safety-critical domain: mistakes in tooling can hide mistakes in driving behavior
My role
I owned the frontend for scenario playback and telemetry visualization, working directly with backend and simulation engineers.
Approach
Render on the GPU, reserve the DOM for controls
Built the dense visual surfaces in WebGL with D3 handling scales and interaction logic — keeping the render loop independent of React’s reconciliation.
Design for playback, not just display
Scenario debugging is temporal: engineers scrub, replay, and compare. The architecture treated time as a first-class dimension rather than an afterthought on top of static charts.
Align with the pipelines that produce the data
Worked with backend teams so the tooling matched how simulation and hardware testing actually emit data — avoiding a beautiful frontend for a format nobody used.
Result
- Visualization surfaces that validation engineers relied on to inspect and debug autonomous-driving behavior at scale.
- Interaction that stayed responsive under heavy simulated load — dense telemetry without frozen tabs.
- Frontend tooling integrated into the validation workflow rather than sitting beside it.
Technologies
TypeScript · React · WebGL · D3 · High-frequency data streaming
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