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.

The Modest Control Panel was a multi-tenant Content Management System that allowed merchants to manage their Modest powered storefronts. Features included the management of store themes, payment gateways, shipping methods, orders, third party e-commerce product syncing, and even generating standalone iOS applications. The back-end of this app was built in Python using the Flask framework. The front-end was initially built with plain Javascript and jQuery, but was eventually migrated to React. As the Modest client application tech lead, I oversaw and greatly contributed to the overall product architecture and implementation of this web application.

The Modest Web Store was a mobile-first, responsive, multi-tenant web application that powered each of our merchant's web-based storefronts. In addition to (and more importantly than) a browsable store, it powered contextual buy buttons and instant checkout screens that could be embedded into ads, emails, and anywhere else on the web or in a mobile application. The client-side of the web store was initially built in Backbone.js and integrated with the Modest Commerce API via a thin Node.js proxy. Later, we started to migrate the front-end to Vue.js. I was the architect, tech lead, and leading contributor to the web client.

Call Tool is a phone canvassing web application used by both Obama for America and the DNC. In its simplest form, it provided volunteers with a potential voter to call and a relevant script to read. The volunteer could then record the answers from the potential voter, which were used to learn more about how the campaign should be operating or targeting individuals. Underneath its shell, Call Tool had a fairly complex architecture that proxied all of its data through our Narwhal API and interfaced with a Voter Checkout Service API and synced with 2 of the campaign's vendors. I architected and built the Call Tool web application and its communication with the Narwhal API from the ground up. I also extended several parts of the Voter Checkout Service to make it more performant, tighten protection against fraudulent callers, and better integrate with our vendors. As I took on other tasks on the campaign, I worked with other engineers and oversaw all development on the application.

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.

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.

Perficut is one of the leading landscaping and lawn service companies in Des Moines, IA. They came to our company, Red Five seeking a more serious web presence along with some custom tools. In addition to a complete redesign built around our CMS, I also built a large custom irrigation and service scheduler for Perficut and their clients. This scheduler allowed Perficut to define a season, serviceable neighborhoods, average appointment times, the number of crews available, and other small details. From here, the tool allowed Perficut to assign crews to neighborhoods (based on stats from the previous season). Once this was all set up, customers could visit Perficut's site to schedule sprinkler system startups, shutdowns, and service. On top of this custom tool, I was also in charge of integrating this site into our SiteMan CMS and deploying the site.

Countryside Motorsports is an interesting little site that I was able to crank out pretty quickly in 2008. However, we got it done right when our client got super busy, so it sat unlaunched for about a year until we were able to resurrect, update, and launch the site. It was a pretty basic marketing/inventory viewing site for an ATV, Snowmobile dealer in Iowa. I modeled and built a custom admin for managing inventory, specials, and homepage banners.

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.

SiteMan is a Content Management System that we built at Red 5 Interactive. It was originally built so that mall property owners could manage each of their mall property's websites. However, once we realized how powerful our system was, we decided to generalize the app so that we could deploy it for all of our clients. We rebuilt SiteMan to allow our clients to easily manage a single website or a group of websites. This way, a parent company could edit any of their child company websites, while employees of the child companies would only be able to see and manage their respective site. The front-ends of the sites managed by SiteMan were also completely extracted from SiteMan itself, which was great for 2 reasons. First of all, it allowed us to more easily keep all of our clients' systems up-to-date in that we were just updating SiteMan and not touching their presentation layer. Secondly, it also allowed us to launch new campaigns and designs for clients very quickly without touching the content management system. When we deployed SiteMan for a client it came with a core group of tools like user management, web page editing, file management, audit logs, etc. From there, custom tools could be added as plugins. These tools included functionality like, announcements, events, careers, photo galleries, stores, social networking, etc. We also built SiteMan in a way that allowed users to customize their tool layout. Any user could pick which tools they used the most and arrange them in a way to get a quick snapshot of the exact data that they were interested in. Tools could be added, removed, or sorted at any time - and everything remained just as they left it on their next visit. This application was very Javascript heavy, making extensive use AJAX, dialog windows, and WYSIWYG editing. As such, we had minimal page loads which provided a very streamlined experience for our clients. I am very proud and excited to have worked with such a great team on this app. It was so versatile and simple to keep pushing forward.

Edwards Graphics Arts (a partner to NAPA) hired our company to build a web application for distributing posters and flyers to NAPA's retail stores. Each store could purchase any of several different promotional products. This is a process that NAPA and it's 3rd party designers had previously handled over the phone. I built a web application to help streamline this process and eliminate phone ordering. This app allowed Edwards Graphic Arts to upload and edit designs for the stores to order. Retail store managers could then visit the site and order promotional products that fit their demographic. This site was very javascript heavy with a lot of asynchronous calls to provide a quick user experience. I also integrated it with PayPal's Pay Flow Pro to allow for online payment.