Derrick Wiest

In July 2024, I teamed up with Alex Phelps and Brendan Turner to create what started as PinHub but has since evolved into Flippd, a pinball-oriented social media platform. What began as a content aggregator has transformed into a thriving community where pinball enthusiasts share photos, scores, and reviews through a timeline-based social feed.

The platform centers around user-generated content with smart algorithms that surface significant achievements, personal bests, and community highlights. We still maintain our foundational features like local event calendars, interactive venue maps, and our comprehensive pinball machine encyclopedia, but they now seamlessly integrate with the social experience.

As of December 2024, we've officially acquired Pindigo, strengthening our position as the go-to platform for pinball score tracking and community engagement.

In 2024, I took on my first marketing site project for Bahia Pez Vela, a luxury resort community in Costa Rica. This was uncharted territory for me since I'd never built a hospitality marketing site before, but the challenge turned out to be exactly what I needed to push my skills in new directions.

The biggest technical hurdle was integrating with their existing booking platform, which offered essentially no API to work with. I ended up having to scrape their booking system's HTML responses to extract availability data, then cache and filter it to provide a seamless search experience without users having to leave the site.

Building for an international audience meant implementing proper localization from the ground up using Paraglide, supporting both English and Spanish with smart URL routing. I also got to work with Mapbox again, creating an interactive resort map where guests can explore different villa locations and immediately check availability.

JukeRabbit started as a solution to a problem I'd witnessed too many times: party music becoming a source of tension instead of fun. You know the scene: someone gets aux access and suddenly everyone's fighting over the queue. I built JukeRabbit as essentially TouchTunes for house parties, where the host creates a session, connects their speakers, and shares a six-digit code with guests who can then request songs and watch the playlist evolve in real time.

What sets JukeRabbit apart from solutions like Spotify's Jams is the smart queue management. Instead of just dumping new requests at the end of a potentially endless queue, it intelligently prioritizes songs based on how long it's been since each guest heard one of their picks, keeping everyone engaged.

While I'm still waiting on official Spotify approval to open it up publicly, it's been a huge hit at my own events. If you're curious to see it in action, I'd be happy to give you a demo.