I’m David Sanchez, a software engineer based in Toulouse, France, where I’ve spent most of my career around 3D and space.

3D came first: I started in 2000 by writing a 3D engine from scratch in C++/OpenGL, then worked on augmented reality (virtual try-on) and later VR training simulators with Unity and custom shaders. Around 2018 I moved into the space industry: satellite imagery services, then an Earth observation ground segment, and for the last few years Space Situational Awareness (SSA) platforms that track objects in orbit.

That’s how I got into Cesium. Since 2023 I’ve used CesiumJS (with React/TypeScript) to display orbits, satellites and radar data, with Orekit for the orbital mechanics behind it. The main challenge has been scale: a public satellite catalog has tens of thousands of objects, so I ended up moving from entities to primitives and writing custom vertex and fragment shaders for the orbits.

I recently packaged part of that work as an open-source library, cesium-sgp4-viewer, which shows a whole TLE catalog propagated with SGP4 on the globe. I’ve shared it as a showcase here as well.

Happy to be part of the community, and glad to help with anything orbit or performance-related!