Derek Brooks

Call Tool is a phone canvassing web application used by both Obama for America and the DNC. In its simplest form, it provides volunteers with a relevant script to read and a voter to Call. The volunteer records the answers of the voter, which are 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… Show more

Call Tool is a phone canvassing web application used by both Obama for America and the DNC. In its simplest form, it provides volunteers with a relevant script to read and a voter to Call. The volunteer records the answers of the voter, which are 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 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. Show less

Voter Registration SaaS was a thin, skinnable, multi-lingual, voter registration web application built on top of the DNC's Voter Registration API. This app lived in several places - most notably at the hilariously named gottaregister.com, which was mentioned by President Obama in several speeches, on television, within social media and even on reddit.

In most states, this application basically acted as a fancy PDF filler that the user could print and mail in. However, it also allowed us… Show more

Voter Registration SaaS was a thin, skinnable, multi-lingual, voter registration web application built on top of the DNC's Voter Registration API. This app lived in several places - most notably at the hilariously named gottaregister.com, which was mentioned by President Obama in several speeches, on television, within social media and even on reddit.

In most states, this application basically acted as a fancy PDF filler that the user could print and mail in. However, it also allowed us to capture their voter information so that we could follow up and target that potential voter in the future.

I inherited this application early-on and was in charge of making sure it was both stable and scalable while overseeing implementation of the campaign's evolving feature requests. It was one of the most interesting applications to scale because it rarely received organic traffic. It would get absolutely slammed when the president or some celebrity mentioned or linked to the application in speeches, on air, or in social media.

This was addressed by extensive caching, limiting dynamic content on landing pages, and queueing API requests in the event of API downtime or slowness. The queueing backup that I implemented (using Amazon's SQS) saved us thousands of voter registrations alone.

We also made this application embeddable and eventually open sourced the core of it. Show less

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