Dan's Corner of the Internet

Welcome to Daniel Brook's personal website. This is just a landing page for my collection of various project work over the years. Feel free to poke around a little, maybe something will be interesting. Jump over to my GitHub account (link on the left) for any software related things, too.

What I do

I am a Software Engineer with nearly 10 years of industry experience. My experience covers around 7 years on C/C++ backend applications and 2 years of web-based GUI work on an embedded Linux system. I love the puzzle-like nature of taking user requirements and turning them into something wonderful. User interface / frontend work is what got me into Computer Science, but I like to think that my broad experience in the backend world gives me a unique perspective on how to approach any problem.

Past and Current Projects

A list of personal or school projects, unrelated to any particular employment:

• Reanalysis of Southern New England Tornadogenesis Events from 1997 – 2006 to Improve Forecast Verifications - My senior project for Lyndon State College and my project while I was a student summer volunteer at the National Weather Service in Taunton, MA. My research focused on the events for which WSR-88D data was available. I also presented the project at the 8th Annual Southern New England Weather Conference!
• The Red Cell Statistical Compatibility Calculator - this was my first foray into a real cross-platform C++ program with a GUI.
• Yankee Swap Tool - My family does a Yankee Swap each year during the holidays and hosting it here means I can always download it wherever the swap happens.
• GtfsProc (back-end source) - This project caused some sleepless nights (literally, as capturing and testing after-midnight real-time prediction data required staying up late before I scripted it!) It is a GTFS open public transit data parser / database server designed to quickly calculate wait times based on real-time vehicle data and published schedules. The aim was to make a single standard server interface for transit data unlike the federated APIs of different agencies. I have a back end tracking/updating MBTA data which you can browse here.
• VidPokerTerm (source) - This is a Qt / C++ based video poker game I have been trying to put together during the sheer boredom during that is the COVID-19 lockdowns. What makes it fun is it will be a full Qt-GUI program, but also will run with low-level graphic LCDs and GPIO buttons for making a complete standalone Raspberry Pi based game. Check out the progress of the prototype here!
• BCI Trade Show - Semantic UI React (source) - Semantic UI (React) based web application for use by dealers attending the Bradley Caldwell Spring/Fall Trade Shows. This is not affiliated with BCI in any way, I created this as I help out a friend attending these shows and the paper-wrangling process I was doing felt like it could use the help of some kind of process tracking app.

Biography

I was an operational meteorologist for a year and a half in Grand Forks, North Dakota at Meridian Environmental Technology. I discovered my interest in programming in both my on- and off-time and had a realization that it was more fulfilling to help solve peoples' problems/annoyances with software than it was to forecast the weather so I decided to pursue it as a full-blown career!

My computer science career has taken me from the Search, Shopping, and Pricing platform at Amadeus (where we worked on a large legacy backend to calculate airline ticket prices - around 2 billion transactions per day!) to developing a web-based GUI on a point-of-care medical diagnostic device at LumiraDx where I became the UI team's Technical Lead before the entire project was unfortunately suspended.

About this site

This site is hosted on a Linode. It's nice in that I can do more than just host a web server on it!

Updated: 28-Nov-2022