The Portfolio of Derek Brooks

Flickr API

Flickr is one of the first APIs that I really dove into with my personal development projects. I've used it for syncing, uploading, downloading, tagging, and even geotagging photos on Flickr.com. I love using the Flickr API simply because it acts as a nice backup of photos. Plus, they provide some nice organization tools.

Here are 6 projects that I've worked on tagged Flickr API.

derek.broox.com

Screenshot of derek.broox.com
derek.broox.com is my general home page, online scrapbook, and development playground. Its primary purpose is to catalog my life and allow me to play with various APIs and web development technologies. It serves up thousands of photos, check-ins, microblogs, blogs, maps, videos, and various other data from my life. Since 2001, it has been a constantly evolving web application.

v8 - latest version

This is the first version of my site that I completely rebuilt in a new language and platform. I moved the entire site from a containerized LAMP stack to a server-side-rendered (SSR) Nuxt.js application that relies completely on the Broox API to power its content. I chose Nuxt and SSR in order to keep my SEO and open graph / social sharing meta tags intact while still providing a speedy, asynchronous client-side browsing experience.

Broox Integration

Broox Integration is a containerized set of scheduled and manually run Python scripts that I use to manage the data that powers the Broox API. Its primary purpose is to sync data with various social networks (Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare), but I also use it for things like moving photo assets to cloud storage providers or running batch operations on my local data. All third party API response data that I fetch is cached in a Mongo DB and then manipulated to store only the relevant data in the MySQL DB that powers the Broox API.

Dipity

Screenshot of Dipity
In short, Dipity was an interactive digital timeline web application with a hint of social networking. We built an incredible web-based tool that allowed users to create, share, embed and collaborate on interactive timelines that integrated video, audio, images, text, social media, geolocation and of course, accurate timestamps. Timeline viewers could pan around and zoom into these timelines for a very nice, visually engaging experience. Being that it was all built in vanilla javascript, it even worked, and was incredibly responsive, on mobile devices, ipads, etc.

v3 - latest version

Building Dipity 3 is the main reason I was hired. Version 2 was a couple years old. The design was dated, its timeline widget was built on the YUI library, and was generally inefficient. Dipity 3's goal was to update the look, improve the widget's efficiency, support HTML5 guidelines, function on mobile devices, and provide several new features. I built the front-end from the ground up, added several new features in both the front and back end (including Facebook connect, better registration process, etc), and worked closely with our other part-time engineer on the completely rewritten javascript timeline widget. I spent a lot of time making sure that the new Dipity timeline widget worked on mobile devices such as androids, iPhones, and iPads.

Smithson Woodworks

Screenshot of Smithson Woodworks
Smithson Woodworks is a side project that was run by my cousin-in-law, Jon Smithson. One year we decided to trade, he'd build me a component rack for my entertainment center, and I'd help him get his stuff online. Jon sent me a logo and some photos of his work, I helped him by setting up a Wordpress site that integrated with a Flickr account. Jon simply uploaded photos and created albums on Flickr and those would become automatically mirrored to the portfolio on SmithsonWoodworks.com.

Cownie For State House

Screenshot of Cownie For State House
Iowa Republican Peter Cownie hired our company to build a promotional website during the 2008 election. He wanted a pretty standard, informational site with a blog, and some photos. Since so many of our clients wanted blog-like functionality, I built a Rails blog plugin (named Bee-Log) and this site was the first to make use of it. I also integrated this site with the Flickr API to display photos from Peter's Flickr account. P.S. Peter Cownie won. Probably because of this website.

Justin Marks Racing

Screenshot of Justin Marks Racing
The company I work for, Red 5 Interactive was hired to build a site for NASCAR truck driver, Justin Marks. Our basic guideline from the driver was to "make it like Bam Margera's site." He really enjoyed moving elements, photos, and of course - a music player. My job was to integrate the site with Justin Marks' Flickr account, build XML feeds to power our flash app, and also build a non-flash version of the site.