Derrick Wiest

In July 2024, Alex Phelps brought me and Brendan Turner on to build what started as PinHub and has since become Flippd. Alex, the founder and CEO, wanted a real home base for competitive pinball. Brendan took the back end and I led the front end. What began as a content aggregator is now a full platform for tracking scores, climbing leaderboards, and getting to know the machines you play.

Flippd is really 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. Around that sits a machine encyclopedia of rules and strategy guides, interactive venue maps, and event listings that plug players into their local scene. A social feed ties it together with standout scores and community highlights.

In December 2024, Flippd acquired Pindigo, folding years of score-tracking history and an established community into the platform.

I run Home Assistant at home and wanted a dashboard that looked like something I'd designed rather than something I'd configured. Every option I found hands you its own UI and lets you theme around the edges. hass-react goes the other way: it gives you live entity state and typed controls, and you write every pixel yourself.

The interesting problem was state. A house has hundreds of entities, and the naive approach re-renders the whole tree whenever any one of them changes. So a single shared WebSocket keeps everything in sync while each component only re-renders when its own entity moves. All 17 entity types work either as a render-prop component or a hook, so you choose per component instead of committing to one style up front.

The piece I didn't expect to enjoy building is the mock mode: a simulated Home Assistant that answers service calls and state changes like the real one, so you can work on a dashboard without a house nearby. Auth covers OAuth with token refresh, long-lived tokens, and a server-side transport that keeps credentials out of the browser. It's MIT, on npm, and documented at hass-react.com.

I picked up a few cheap mmWave radar sensors for better occupancy detection around the house. The only way to configure them turned out to be a barely translated app that hands you raw threshold numbers and no way to see what they do. So I built the one I wanted: connect over Bluetooth, watch a live radar plot of what the sensor sees, and tune it while you walk the room.

Most of the work was in the protocol. These sensors speak a binary command format over Bluetooth LE and ship no mobile SDK, so I checked every frame against a known-good open source implementation before writing any of it, then built the reassembler that turns the notification stream back into config acknowledgements and per-gate energy readings.

My favorite part is the calibration. Every room reflects radar differently, so factory defaults are a guess. The app measures the room's own background noise at each distance band and places detection thresholds relative to that. I confirmed the writes really reach the chip by reading them back with the manufacturer's tool after power cycling the sensor.

It's on the App Store and Google Play now. Everything runs on device: no backend, no accounts, no analytics, just Bluetooth to the sensor.

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.

I revived it after a long hiatus: ported it to Apple Music and gave it a full UI overhaul. It's live at jukerabbit.app, nothing to install. Open it up and start a session.

In 2024, I built my first marketing site: Bahía 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 so guests get a fast 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.