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.

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.

This is a RESTful API to surface all of my personal data like blogs, microblogs, photos, geodata, etc. It currently powers derek.broox.com and photos.broox.com.

Venmo Gift Wrapping provided a fun way for users to send payments with animated greeting cards to friends and family. This was a shotgun project with a tight deadline that I co-led, architected, and developed alongside a small team of engineers. We leveraged AWS lambdas and DynamoDB to power the storefront for the different designs and proxied all mobile requests through the Venmo Platform API. The product shipped on time and launched with a beautiful short film produced by Wong Fu Productions.

Purchase Protection provided a simple toggle button for Venmo consumers to specify whether or not they're paying for goods or services while sending a payment. When a payment is sent for goods and services, the seller would be charged a small fee and the payment would automatically be covered under Venmo's Purchase Protection Program. If something went awry with the transaction, both the buyer and seller could be covered and reimbursed. I was the lead architect for this feature and designed the APIs, data storage and fee collection solutions.

The Venmo Credit Card offers up to 3% cash back on a user's top expenditures. After Venmo launched the ability for users to buy and hold cryptocurrency in their accounts, we decided to allow Credit Card users to automatically turn their cash back rewards into the cryptocurrency of their choice. I co-led the effort and worked with a small team of engineers to architect and build the new functionality that made heavy use of Cloudevents, PayPal's crypto APIs, and internal Venmo services to get the job done.

Amidst the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chicago Venmo team was tasked with launching one of our most ambitious products. We worked closely with PayPal Credit, Synchrony Bank, and several internal Venmo teams to launch a branded Venmo Credit Card product in just 10 months time. I served as a tech lead and cross-company liaison to help architect and lead the development of the Credit Card servicing portion of the product. This included the data syncing, data structures, and API design to power the interfaces that a user sees when viewing or managing any information about their credit card in the Venmo Application. Later, I worked with a small team to add Cryptocurrency Reward functionality and also led the effort to get the Credit Card service's codebase upgraded to a more modern version of Python.

Venmo Payouts is a product that I got to build as a proof of concept and then turn into a full-fledged product alongside a small team of developers. The initial proof of concept was a shotgun hack to power a couple marketing campaigns that would allow merchants like Chipotle to send small payments to users in an effort to get them to buy burritos. After the success of the pilot campaigns, I acted as a tech lead and liaison between the Venmo team and PayPal MassPay teams to architect and build out a highly scalable merchant-to-consumer payout platform. I designed the APIs, data stores, and contracts between PayPal and Venmo.

The Venmo Debit card is a physical card that Venmo users can request to make purchases with their Venmo balance. This was one of the first products that we offered that would allow users to do more than just peer-to-peer payments with their Venmo wallet. I developed APIs and data stores related to storing sensitive user information including the federally required Customer Identification Program (CIP) user information. I also worked on various other debit card servicing APIs like the card design picker and card renewal.

In the early 2000s, I often found myself at a mechanic or auto-parts store needing to know the last time I performed a certain service on my vehicles. So I whipped up a tiny web-app to help track and display this information. A decade later I became bored while traveling, so I decided to clean up the old app and publish the code. It's a super simple PHP/MySQL CRUD application based off of an ORM and Model framework that I built after learning Rails in 2008. The app itself barely has any features but I published the code publicly to show some friends my simple PHP framework. Today, I'd just use a damned google docs spreadsheet to track this stuff.

Carfiend was a mobile application built for car enthusiasts to share photos of both their own cars and cars in the wild. The idea was that it would become an Instagram for gearheads. A couple friends and I were hired to build the backing API for the project. We collectively architected the application and built the API out in Python using Flask and SQLAlchemy. I built many of the endpoints and models for interacting with cars, photos, events, other users, search, etc.

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.

The 2012 Obama Re-election campaign was a firm believer in that the more voters who turn-out to vote the more likely Democrats are to win the election. With that, the campaign put a huge effort into cataloging voting locations and making sure voters had the tools they needed to find these locations. As the lead engineer of voter contact I architected and built the data layers, integration tools, and APIs to allow client applications to get at the data. I worked very closely with our data team, the DNC, voting location experts, and our front-end team. Despite the incredible challenges that came with the constantly evolving, incomplete/disorganized data and different laws/rules in each state, we built a comprehensive, nation-wide election day lookup tool. In addition to that, we built the first ever nation-wide "early vote" lookup tools. Not only was this data available via online lookup tools, it also integrated with DNC applications and allowed our phone canvassing applications to automatically display relevant voting locations for the canvassed voter.

Narwhal was the famous technology infrastructure behind Barack Obama's 2012 Re-election campaign. It was a Python-based interface and integration layer that allowed us to unify the disconnected pieces of what we knew about voters, volunteers, event-goers, voting locations, etc. I was one of the top 5 contributors to the Narwhal project. The integration side was a small web layer that handled syncing data with our vendors in real-time. Incoming data was saved to a local database and then became queued via SQS for translation and loading (by our integration workers) into the Narwhal interface layer. Here, I extended existing integrations and built some parts to sync voter applicant and precinct data. The interface side allowed us to use this unified data to quickly build dozens of client applications for various tasks across the campaign. I spent most of my time in Narwhal building and extending models and endpoints to support client application needs. The pieces I worked on helped support pollster surveys, phone canvassing, volunteer organizing, image processing, voting location lookup, incident tracking, etc. I also built a thin Ruby Gem that allowed our ruby based API consumer applications to quickly and easily interface with the Narwhal API.

Debate Watch was a web application loosely based on Planned Parenthood's "Pledge a Protestor" program. The basic idea is that you make your opposition pay for negative actions by allowing your supporters to pledge money each time the opposition attempts slander. With Debate Watch, we took some of the Republican candidates' favorite demeaning terms and promoted them on our site along with some fact checking. Obama supporters could then pledge to donate a certain amount of money each time a given word was said during the debate, and of course put a max cap on their donation in case something got out of control. We had a team of word trackers stuffed in a room listening to the debate and tallying the terms in real-time. On the website's front-end the words would then re-arrange and scale in real-time as our pledgers watched. I built the entire back-end of the application along with the word tracker and a small JSON API for consumption by our front-end team. This application was built primarily as an experiment to test some of our scaling and payment infrastructure but managed to be quite fun and also earned us tens of thousands of dollars early on.

Artworks was a web application that allowed Obama supporters to vote on items in a contest. It was primarily used for promotional poster competitions. This app was built in PHP using the Kohana PHP framework. I worked on some of the core functionality of this application as well as built the basic CMS. I also integrated it with Facebook's Open Graph API to allow users to login to vote as well as publish custom open graph actions to their timeline. Unfortunately we launched this before Facebook's custom actions had publicly launched, so we didn't get to use that portion of the app.

Tweet Your Rep was a simple application that allowed supporters to easily post tweets to their state representatives based on current issues. It allowed Obama For America to create a promotional campaign, select the chambers and parties to target, and then add some pre-built tweets templates for supporters to use. I architected and built the API layer and basic CMS as well as integrated it with the Twitter and the Sunlight Labs Congress APIs.

Debate Quotes was my first assignments after joining Obama for America, and my re-introduction to Rails after not using it in over a year. It was built to keep track of, call out, and fact check quotes during the early Republican debates. Technically, it was a basic CRUD Rails application that exposed both normal views and a JSON based API for use by the front-end. We had this application in production 72 hours after I joined the campaign and iterated on it for another debate a few weeks later.

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.

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.

Mary McAdams is a Des Moines area folk artist who was becoming super well known in the area. Mary hired my friend Mindy Hoskin as her designer - and Mindy approached me to bring her designs to life. Having a small web budget and not a lot of time, I used this opportunity to brush up my WordPress skills. I was able to build Mindy's designs out into a WordPress template and still keep a lot of the custom functionality that Mary wanted. Along with her blog, Mary also wanted a lot of multimedia - photos, video, a music player, show times, downloads, etc. For photos, I was able to customize one of the many WordPress Flickr plugins to work with Mindy's design. Show times and the Music player were powered by Mary's ReverbNation account. To make show times work, I hooked her ReverbNation calendar RSS feed to FeedBurner BuzzBoost and embedded the generated BuzzBoost into her blog accordingly. Combined with Mary's active social networking, I think we were successful in getting all of her info in front of an audience in an elegant way.

S & C Automotive is a company that provides vehicle warranties and protections to local car dealerships. If you bought a car from any of several dealerships in Iowa, you'd be offered a set of warranties - paint protection, rust protection, etc. These protections were all sold to the dealerships by S & C. I built a web application to allow S & C to manage these protections and offer them to dealerships. The dealerships had their own accounts and could log in and select each protection that they sell. Then, S & C could view, process, ship, and bill for these registrations.

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.

Five point studios was a professional piercing and custom tattoo shop in Johnston, IA. I was hired to revamp their severely outdated website and built them a custom content management so the shop could manage any page as well as manage staff members and portfolios. I incorporated one of the shop's tattoo sketches into the design along with a fancy font that they requested. As with any website, if the visitors don't have that font installed, they won't see your fancy text. So, using PHP's GD library, I wrote functionality to dynamically load their font and create fancy title images on the fly. The site was much more successful in allowing Five Point to showcase the incredible work that consistently came out of their shop.

I built this site for Aeon Grey, a Des Moines hip hop artist, to promote both himself and his 5th solo album: Primate Curriculum. Aeon Grey wanted a very lite site that would include a forum and also allow him to publish photos, videos, and mp3s. The site's news was integrated with the forum to allow Aeon to display important updates on both, the forum and the home page. I worked graphic designer, Mindy Hoskin, for the graphic elements, which are taken primarily from the album art that she designed. I also did some of Aeon Grey's photography and videography.

Truespin Media was a small partnership that my friend, Nick Leeper, and I started up to work on side-gigs. We originally planned on offering several services including: video production, photography, graphic design, and web development. However, we focused primarily on the development and design pieces.

Rebels Advocate was a Midwest Hip Hop group that got together in Iowa City. With their gaining popularity they decided they needed a strong web presence to show the world what they were all about. Rebels Advocate was referred to my partnership needing both a website and a music video. With a very limited budget, we had to cut a lot of corners, but the results of both the video and the website turned on great. The site allowed visitors to check out their bios, video, photos, and most importantly, their music. We also installed a community driven forum to keep visitors coming back to the site and gave them analytics to track the site's traffic.

Iowa Business Alliance came to my partnership with a design in place, but they needed help bringing their vision to life. We built them a useful, dynamic website with a custom content management system that they could use to attract potential clients.

Iowa Retail Federation came to my partnership wanting to refresh their current site. The content on their site was sufficient, but they wanted a way to manage it easily and efficiently. We worked with them to provide a website with a custom content management system to meet their current and future needs.

Soft Focus Art was a local Hip Hop and DJ group who came to my partnership with a limited budget and hopes of a fairly complex, dynamic website. They wanted to be able to update their viewers with bios, media, news, and information about upcoming shows; but they also wanted to keep the design simple with crisp lines and have everything animated via Flash. We helped them out and provided a simple animated design with a PHP/MySQL content management system that delivered XML to the Flash module to display the dynamic content.

A friend of mine from the Long Beach chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon contacted me seeking some extensions to their current website. They wanted a content management system to allow for easy management of active members, alumni, alumni job postings, dues, a calendar of events, etc. My partner and I were able to provide them with a very user-friendly administration panel to manage all of this data. SAE also wanted a photo gallery and forum which we installed and fit 2 previously built systems for.

Trek For Kids was a fundraising bike ride for The Boys and Girls Club of Dane County. Their website provided information about the ride, allowed people register to ride, and also let people make pledges to the registered rider. A friend of mine contacted me to contract out the development for small section of this site. Shortly after, my partner and I were hired to design and program the rider registration, pledge donations, and full administration/reporting tools. This was our first time diving into accepting credit card payments, but we were able to get the registration and donation sections up and running on a secure server and used encryption in order to ensure protection for the visitors. The administration panel let Trek For Kids manage users, teams, donations, etc. It also provided full reporting to keep them up to date on number of registered riders, team rosters, and pledge standings.

Vedanta was an Art Gallery located in Chicago, IL. They approached my partnership seeking a PHP extension to their existing site, which listed past, current, and upcoming exhibition details along with photos related to each. As such, we designed and built a light content management system that allowed them to easily manage exhibitions and photos that would be displayed on their front end. Vedanta changed their name a while after this launch, but they continued to use the CMS that we built for quite some time.

Regulatory Solutions Inc. wanted to get an online presence established and approached me and my partner to help them get started. The goal of the site was to provide a large amount of regulatory information to their customers in a quick and digestible way. To accomplish this, we designed a simple, flexible content management system that allowed Regulatory Solutions to easily add and manage users, documents, and updates. The finished product enabled their customers to get the most up-to-date news to help with their regulatory decision making.

SolidGrind is a personal project that I developed as an extreme sports / soap shoes promotional and community website. It's the predecessor of my former Broox Extreme (www.broox.com) and BrooksFSW community sites. After I came up with the name and domain, I decided that rather than customizing a prebuilt system, I wanted to build this site from scratch. Developing the entire site myself was another great learning experience and paid off numerous times; I had full control and a great understanding of the system, so I could easily add on, fix bugs, and rebuild sections. One of the more fun parts of SolidGrind was the "feature pic" system. It allowed users to upload photos to be reviewed by the administrators that I'd hired. The uploaded photos were queued in a database and could be viewed/approved by administrators. Upon approval, the website would automatically size/scale the image, add a SolidGrind.com watermark to it, create a thumbnail, store it in the database, and feature the picture on the homepage until a new photo was chosen. In addition, I designed it so that each picture had to be featured for at least 24 hours; this gave everyone a fair amount of time on our front page. Besides photos, the site featured news, forums, tutorials, videos, and several other things related to extreme sports.

Wireless Wallpapers was a personal project of mine. It was a site that allowed users to download wallpapers for their early 2000s color screened mobile phones. At the time there were several sites offering this service however nearly all of them only supported one type of phone or charged money for each wallpaper downloaded (usually $1.00 per wallpaper). Wireless Wallpapers allowed users to download unlimited wallpapers for free, which were available for several types of phones. The free wallpapers had a tiny "wirelesswallpapers" watermarks near the bottom of the image, however if the user paid a small fee each month, they could get more features (such as private wallpapers) and the watermark was removed. In addition to this, I added functionality to allow users to upload their own images to the website which gave me the ability to let the site run itself. The website automatically resized the uploaded user images to fit various mobile screen sizes and printed my watermark to the image. The site was a huge success and learning experience. The first day it was online it received 7,000 hits and had nearly 100 users. After the first week there were nearly 50,000 hits and 500 users. Upon selling the site, I had over 24,000 users and received over 3,200,000 hits.

I developed this site for the James Laas Company out of Bettendorf, Iowa. At the time, it was one of the largest, most complex, and complete systems that I'd built. Prior to my development, they made all of their updates by updating static HTML files - a content management system was very much needed. They had a huge amount of content and product information that became quite redundant in the way that they were displaying it. I designed a more aesthetically pleasing site powered by a PHP/MySQL back-end. With the new design, I concentrated mostly on the ease of navigation and finding vital information quickly, which was successfully attained. Their site became completely free of managing and uploading static files and was updateable via the CMS that I created. The database proved to be very useful as the James Laas company wrote several articles per month. This site was also the home of the first site wide search engines that I'd built. Jhlaas.com was a huge success and a great learning experience.

I held an internship at Lujack's Northpark Auto Plaza for the month of September 2002. During this month one of my projects was to build an intranet system to allow administrators to post news and happenings within the plaza. The site uses a PHP/MySQL back-end to submit news, and also to display uploaded articles. Since the people who will be administering the site don't know much about web design, I made this site as simple and fool proof as possible. They used the intranet system for quite some time and it proved to be very helpful for relaying information throughout the plaza.

This is one of the many sites I built while on the Cornell College student webteam. It is probably my favorite due to the tight deadline and how well everything worked out. First of all, I had a 4-day deadline on this project. Cornell introduced a new marketing scheme to give students information about the college, which was titled "The Simple Truth." The college had hundreds of pamphlets printed out, which they would send to everyone who visited truth.cornellcollege.edu. On top of that we even had an advertisement going into U.S. News, which had a link to the site I was supposed to build (hence the short deadline). The site was only to be 1 page long, had to open in a static sized window, and needed to have a PHP based form to collect data and insert information into a database. On top of all of that, they wanted flash animation for the header. The screenshot pictured is simply of the flash animation.

I made this web application for a computer science class at Cornell. One of the projects suggested by our syllabus was a flashcard program written in the language of our choice. I chose PHP/MySQL in a heartbeat. The program allowed users to choose whether they wanted to test their vocabulary from English to Spanish or from Spanish to English. I wrote functionality that retrieves a random word from the database every time they choose a new card. Once a card is selected it is cached and marked as 'viewed'. This would make sure the program goes through every card before it repeats one of the previous ones. It was also designed so the user could choose which type of words they wanted to learn. They could select from adjectives, nouns, verbs, or all at once.

Broox Extreme was the former version of SolidGrind.com. It was an extreme sports website that included 6 categories: bmx, inline, scooter, skateboard, snowboard, and soap shoes. Each section had the latest news and information along with user submitted photos and videos. I hired several authors who specialized in at least one category of the site to help me keep everyone informed of what's going on. Almost a year after the site was released (October 2001), broox.com received over 700,000 hits and had nearly 700 registered users. Upon closing, the site was just shy of 1 million hits. YM (Your Magazine) found this site and contacted me in order to feature me and some of my "Soaping Buddies." They flew out from New York to do a day long photoshoot of us sliding on handrails, and we were all featured in the April, 2002 of YM magazine!

BrooksFSW was a site dedicated to Soap Shoes, a company that makes shoes capable of sliding across objects such as handrails, benches, etc. The activity of "soaping" is very similar to grinding with inline skates or skateboards. I did promotional work for Soap Shoes for several years and this site was a huge part of that. BrooksFSW was a portal site using PHP Nuke to develop a community for "Soapers." It kept users informed on the latest news and happenings with the company. It also kept everyone involved in friendly competition with photos, polls, forums, and videos. This was the first site I ran that used an extensive PHP and MySQL back-end and was an excellent learning experience for me. My mentor, Harper Reed, helped tremendously with the initial setup and training. It was released in September 2000 and integrated into Broox Extreme in October 2001. During that year it received nearly 620,000 hits and had 800 registered users. The site also had 441 news articles published and over 6,000 comments on those articles. BrooksFSW received some great recognition from large medias such as the British Broadcasting Corporation, The Mount Vernon Sun, The Rock Island Dispatch, and the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Disclaimer: After the BrooksFSW.com domain was released from my posession, another company purchased it. It has been known to display various lewd content. I have no affiliation with the current owner of the website.