The Portfolio of Derek Brooks

Voter Registration SaaS was a thin, skinnable, multi-lingual, voter registration web application built on top of the DNC's Voter Registration API. This app lived in several places - most notably at the hilariously named gottaregister.com, which was mentioned by President Obama in several speeches, on television, within social media and even on reddit. In most states, this application basically acted as a fancy PDF filler that the user could print and mail in. However, it also allowed us to capture their information so that we could follow up and target that potential voter in the future. I inherited this application early-on and was in charge of making sure it was both stable and scalable while overseeing implementation of the campaign's evolving feature requests. It was one of the most interesting applications to scale because it rarely received organic traffic. It would get absolutely slammed when the president or some celebrity mentioned or linked to the application in speeches, on air, or in social media. This was addressed by extensive caching, limiting dynamic content on landing pages, and queueing API requests in the event of API downtime or latency. The queueing backup that I implemented (using Amazon's SQS) saved us thousands of voter registrations alone. We also made this application embeddable and eventually open sourced the core of it.