The Portfolio of Derek Brooks

Google Maps API

I've used the Google Maps API primarily to display the coordinates of geotagged data and also to track trips.

Here are 4 projects that I've worked on tagged Google Maps 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.

Des Moines Alive

Screenshot of Des Moines Alive
Des Moines Alive is a personal project that my friend Nick Leeper and I built to help Des Moines Area folks find awesome local bars and restaurants. In addition to general merchant info, we provided users with aggregated data such as reviews, foursquare tips, merchant tweets, etc. We designed Des Moines Alive to be very lite and easy to navigate. The goal was to provide our visitors with the information they wanted as quickly as possible.

v2 - latest version

Nick and I decided to use this version of Des Moines Alive to learn new things, play with APIs, and switch our focus to local businesses. We built our own custom PHP MVC, with ideas borrowed from our experiences with Rails and Kohana. We redesigned our database to be more efficient. We also began using many more APIs such as SimpleGeo, Google Maps, Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter to aggregate data and give our users more information.

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.

TowRate

Screenshot of TowRate
TowRate was a startup that offered a custom service to towing companies. The site allowed subscribed companies to manage their assets, map routes, and calculate profit margins for every tow. It was built in a way that allowed the towing companies to quickly run these calculations while on the phone, so they could figure out the most profitable way to charge for each tow. On this project, I was in charge of pretty much everything except for the initial design. My job involved data modeling, loads of calculations, back-end development, front-end development, form design, and deployment. TowRate was a very javascript heavy application, using plenty of asynchronous calls for things like sorting, calculating rates on the fly, and grabbing map data from the Google Maps API. The Maps API was used to help determine mileage and time for each tow. From there, the app used extensive math and formulas to help find the best price for each call. Companies were able subscribe to TowRate on a monthly or yearly basis. I integrated PayPal's Web Payments Pro to handle these subscriptions; let users join, autorenew, enter discount codes, cancel accounts, etc. Subscribed companies could also manage their trucks (as well as truck expenses), users, tow rates, tax areas, routes, etc. It provided an all around fleet management solution to any towing company.