Derrick Wiest

JukeRabbit came out of a scene I'd lived through too many times: the party where the music turns into a turf war. Someone grabs the aux, and suddenly everyone's jockeying over the queue. So I built the house-party answer to TouchTunes, the host starts a session, connects their speakers, and shares a six-digit code or QR; guests join from their phones to request songs and watch the playlist evolve in real time.

The part I'm proudest of is the queue itself. Instead of tacking each new request onto the end of an ever-growing list, JukeRabbit weighs songs by how long it's been since each guest last heard one of their picks, so nobody gets drowned out and everyone stays in the mix.

After a long hiatus, I recently revived the project: ported it to Apple Music and gave it a full UI overhaul. It's live now at jukerabbit.app, with nothing to install, just open it up and start a session.

In July 2024, Alex Phelps brought me and Brendan Turner on to build what started as PinHub and has since become Flippd. Alex, the company's founder and CEO, had the vision for a real home base for competitive pinball; Brendan and I built the product that made it real. What began as a simple content aggregator has grown into a full platform for tracking scores, climbing leaderboards, and getting to know the machines you play.

At its heart, Flippd is about your pinball history. You can log scores, chase personal bests, and compare with friends across global and local leaderboards, or connect Stern Insider Connected to import your Stern scores automatically. Wrapped around that is a machine encyclopedia full of rules and strategy guides, interactive venue maps, and event and tournament listings that help players plug into their local scene, all tied together by a social feed that surfaces standout scores and community highlights.

In December 2024, Flippd acquired Pindigo, folding years of real score-tracking history and an established community into the platform and cementing it as a go-to home for competitive pinball.

In 2024, I built my first marketing site: Bahia Pez Vela, a luxury resort community in Costa Rica. Hospitality was new territory for me, and that was exactly the appeal, it pushed me well outside the product work I was used to.

The hardest part was availability. Their existing booking platform offered essentially no API, so I scraped its HTML responses to pull real-time availability, then cached and filtered the results to give guests a fast, seamless search without ever leaving the site.

Because the audience is international, I built localization in from the ground up with Paraglide, serving both English and Spanish behind clean, language-aware URLs. I also got another chance to work with Mapbox, building an interactive resort map where guests can explore individual villas and check their availability on the spot.