Derek writes, designs, overthinks, (re)architects, stratifies, and deletes software. And aims to simply do tech plumb and level.
Favorite places
- The Mind
- Le France, especially Paris et la Côte d'Azur
- On/in/adjacent the water
- On/in/adjacent the mountains
- New-to-me places with old-to-me friends
- Wherever my nieces happen to be
1st album
That I can remember? I'm pretty sure it's either a cassette of New Kids on the Block - Hangin' Tough or of Vanilla Ice - To The Extreme
Really good at
- Of or relating to music(k)
- [Pre-COVID] Traversing the globe
- [Peri-COVID] Staying in one apartment. all. the. fucking. time
- [Post-COVID] The Re-Roaring 20s (hopefully not followed by the Re-Great Depression and the Re-Great War)
- Keeping it sequitur
- Ungineering
- Generally overdoing it
Been coding for
years for shits and giggles, years for stress and bread
Started coding because
Computers were fascinating to me as a child. I started using DOS at an early age and just tinkered on it all the time. When ISPs started popping up I hammered on the Internet a laut. Then on the Web. Then on the codes. Then on the towers. Because my computer compulsion led kid-me to get learnt on programming, it was pretty natural to keep on ridin the train I was already on.
Part of the work that makes you come alive
I feel like this is a pretty moving target. But it's gonna be somewhere near challenging problems with a counterintuitive-for-good-reasons temperature to them. I do like to get my head out of the clouds/abstractions/microdetails and to simply create concrete things for real people. Or better yet, with people. So basically making things with people, for people, that solve problems. Is there a part of the work that isn't that? Maybe working alone? Which I also like. Which begs the question, "am I coming alive at all?" Maybe I'm not. Or maybe I'm not "dead" enough to come alive. Tangential. Why you still readin?
Favorite projects
- Using a doc bot to generate docs from docs
- Designing, building, and launching [with friends] a valid-ass transportation app that simulates the future
- Making an audience intelligence platform melt datums and incept your target market's network graph
- Architecting the human-y bits of an airport ops mobile app that actually won an award
- Presiding over the UX of a carrier-grade telecom platform so non-engineers can choreograph their telephonics without havin to call somebody
Duties
- Architecturing and troublesuturing JavaScripts and Nodes
- Doing Ruby weird
- Making apps glide, transmute, and do useful things when you touch them (or click them)
- Fashioning dense information into interactives that help normal-ass humans do wisdomful shit
- Cybercartography
- Accidentally fucking up the social vibe by putting on music that's bizarrer-/heavier-than-I-remembered-it-being
- Editing the Dojo4 website at the oddest times for the oddest reasons
- Discomfort
- 𝔐𝔢𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔩𝔲𝔯𝔤𝔶
Expertise
Because this is what you probably wanna know, a reward for scrolling this far:
- The bowels of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML
- React
- Node / Express
- Ruby / Rails
- Webpack / Babel / PostCSS / and otherwise (com|trans)pilating
- Mapbox / Leaflet
- D3 / JS charting frameworks (awl of em)
- Ava / Mocha
- Open API / JSON Schema / schema'ed design & dev
- Anything that ends with "Viz"
- UX / DX / CX / and the other initialisms that end with "X" (besides those ones)
Hope it was worth it.
Been with the company how long?
Since just before co-oping, so like years
Hometown
A-town down yall