Michael Brook Email & Phone Number

Des Moines, Ia, Us

Des Moines, Iowa, Us

As Pitchly's Chief Product Officer, I am responsible for setting the company's vision, planning new product developments, orchestrating new product initiatives, and evaluating the evolution of Pitchly's products and direction against business objectives while in pursuit of the Pitchly mission.

Des Moines, Iowa, Us

Pitchly is changing the way businesses manage their data, employees use that data to increase productivity, and developers build for the enterprise. All in a human-friendly way. My role at Pitchly, aside from CTO, is chief visionary and executor of an award-winning product that our customers love.

Boston, Ma, Us

Accepted as a member of the Forbes Technology Council, an invite-only community for senior technology executives such as CIOs and CTOs and writers for Forbes.com.

Des Moines, Iowa, Us

Morelity is a big data company that provides customer and financial insight to the financial services sector, including banks of various sizes and credit unions. They are also able to provide predictive analysis to assist financial businesses with marketing efforts and consumer targeting. I played both a hands-on and leadership role with their company and brought them from conceptualization to product deployment and revenue-positive growth within 3-4 months. I also played a sales role, meeting with chief banks and credit unions across the Midwest to sell our services. At departure, Morelity's customer base had expanded to Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska, in addition to its home base in Des Moines. I helped lead a team of six, including three data scientists, one frontend web developer, and two backend/system administrators. I also provided regular training to web development employees on JavaScript, Meteor, reactive programming, and bulk data processing. The strategic direction I brought to the team helped the company find success in a notoriously difficult industry, and as product visionary, we were able to deliver an unparalleled product and service to customers. See: https://morelity.com/Technologies: Node.js, Meteor.js, jQuery, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Ubuntu Linux, AWS (EC2, S3, SES, SQS, SNS, Route53)

Grimes, Iowa, Us

Shortly after moving to Des Moines, Iowa from California in late September 2014, I started work as a web developer for a company called Slash/Web Studios. Two months later, Slash/Web had merged with Shift Interactive, a web development company in West Des Moines. Across my time at both Slash/Web and Shift Interactive, I managed a plethora of tasks starting in web development and ultimately moving into system administration. My responsibilities included, but were not limited to, maintaining websites built in MODX and WordPress, performing CMS upgrades, administering several shared servers, working with Git repositories, deploying projects to development and production environments, installing SSL certificates, securing servers with SSH keys and secure configurations, diagnosing resource constraints, rewriting backend processes to perform at scale, automating recurring processes, interacting with clients to solve technical issues and/or discover project requirements, migrating to modern systems, and providing insightful cost-benefit analysis at the intersection of technology and business operations.Technologies: PHP, MySQL, C, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Bash, Linux, WordPress, MODX, Git, MLS (real estate)

Songtwist was conceived from the institutional challenges that had previously faced BluePlaylist. As an entirely open platform, it would be a way for artists to get in front of fans quickly without long turn-around times or being beholden to record labels and promoters. The goal was to eliminate the need for a record label by developing relationships directly with artists and promoting their music direct to listener. Life circumstances changed this plan, but a huge investment in time and technology broadened and sharpened by skills. Some of the technology employed in the process of creating Songtwist included creating API's to interact with Songtwist's mobile apps, building a scalable and replicable server architecture, creating distributed task queues for long-running processes such as image and audio transcoding, developing de-deuplication systems for user-uploadable content, creating automated email systems for account notifications, implementing Facebook login, SSL and encryption configuration, and applying best security practices. Countless libraries and tools were developed out of this, and some were shared with the global development community as open-source projects. One such project is a file upload library I developed, called simpleUpload.js, which has been used by companies like Kaiser Permanente (http://simpleupload.michaelcbrook.com/). Other proprietary packages include a command-line utility to convert audio to a JSON set of integral peak values that would produce the waveforms one would see on services such as SoundCloud. Also see: http://michaelcbrook.com/code. While Songtwist was originally built with PHP and jQuery, it was later redone in 2016 using Meteor. The website is still live today at https://www.songtwist.com/Technologies: PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Bash, Ubuntu Linux, AWS (EC2, S3, SES, SQS, SNS, Route53), C++, Node.js, Meteor.js

While still attending UC Santa Cruz, I created a very popular on-demand music service called BluePlaylist. In 2011, it became one of the top five music services globally and boasted almost a quarter of a million users. The service was available via the web, Android app, and BlackBerry PlayBook. It gained noteriety through various news media outlets, and for many, it was their first exposure to an on-demand all-you-can-eat music streaming service. Many of the features originally seen in BluePlaylist can be seen today in services such as Spotify, including remote playing and recommended playlists based on your listening habits. Collaborative filtering, an algorithmic method of song suggestion, is used almost identically by Spotify today in their "Discover Weekly" playlist. Though BluePlaylist is no longer in use today, I believe it helped set the stage for the modern music streaming age.Technologies: PHP, MySQL, Node.js, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, CSS, Bash, CentOS Linux, Java (Android SDK)

Over the course of one summer during college, I worked for The Actus Group, an investment firm located in San Jose, CA. The objective was to create an online service where users could bid on tickets to various events, such as movies, concerts, sporting events, and theme parks. I was hired initially as a frontend web developer and designer but ultimately took on many roles. Some tasks I performed were registering our domain name, setting up our virtual server environment, creating login flows and core webpages, database administration with MySQL, and developing search algorithms. One of my most notable accomplishments, however, was creating a Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithm to search for movie times, movie theater locations, and purchase movie tickets via text message. Strategies employed included probabilistic parsing, information extraction, named-entity recognition, the Levenshtein distance, phonetic search, and location-aware geospatial search. The algorithm could automatically distinguish between movie names, theater names, city names, zip codes, states, and movie times. It was also context-aware, saving location information across different conversational sessions. Other team members (five total) included Ph.D. computer scientists, former eBay employees, and patent-holders, though their focus was mostly on data collection.Technologies: PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Bash, Linux

I created TalkAddict during college as one of my first online businesses. It was a service that helped users stay in touch with friends by aggregating different methods of communication into a single medium, depending on the location of the user in real time. Social network updates, instant messages, text messages, and email could all be forwarded to any medium based on certain parameters. It also offered the ability to aggregate updates from a multitude of social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Unlike other aggregators that only allowed pushing updates to many social networks at once, TalkAddict was also able to receive updates from all networks in one place. Receiving and posting updates could both be done from any medium using the product's aggregation capabilities. In addition, the product had a web-based instant messenger that supported AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, and ICQ. There were very few services that offered this at the time. In the future, I ended up providing tutorials and one-on-one paid mentorship to private companies seeking ways to communicate with their customers over instant message. Public tutorials from this are still accessible at http://libpurple.com. Code from these tutorials has been used by developers all over the world.Technologies: PHP, MySQL, C, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Bash, Linux