Intro

Hello, my name is Derek and this is my home on the web. I’m a 21-year-old software developer, currently living with my wife and daughter in Campbell, CA. I’m a avid proponent of Open Source and have become engrossed in the startup community.

I am currently looking for a job

I am always looking for new opportunities, however. Click here to view my resume..

Find me on

Or email me at derek.payton@gmail.com

Credit where credit is due

This blog is powered by Django with comments provided by Disqus. It runs on an Ubuntu server with Lighttpd and SQLite, provided by the wonderful Slicehost. Special thanks to my Dad, who first sparked my interest in computers and gave me a great taste in music.

Tools of the Trade

  • Markup Languages
    • (X)HTML
    • XML
  • Programming & Scripting Languages
  • Other Languages
    • CSS
    • SQL (MySQL, SQLite)
  • Operating Systems
    • Linux
    • Mac OS X
    • Microsoft Windows (XP & Vista)

Places I’ve worked

As of August 2008, I’m a Software Engineer for Third Iris, an early-stage startup located in Campbell, CA. I spend my time eyeball-deep in Python and helping to build our infrastructure using AWS.

Digital Attic is where I worked in June & July 2008. They’re primarily a PHP shop, but I did land one Django project which ended up serving millions of page views to +50,000 users that ended up submitting +500,000 codes.

Galaxy IT hired me in early 2008 to develop a custom ad server to provide relevant ads to their Flash application. I also setup and maintained their webserver.

Custom Computer Solutions needed someone to do websites for clients, so this is where I worked for the latter half of 2007. I also managed their in-house web servers, and I became an able sysadmin during this time.

Intrigo is a web development company where I spent 10 months, starting in mid-2006, at as a PHP intern. Intrigo was my first professional gig, and I learned a lot.

Other things I’ve done

From mid-2005 to late-2006, I wrote my own forum software in PHP 5, dubbed Discursion Board. It was fairly feature complete, but was never publicly released. Screenshots are here, here, and here.

Much of my early web development career (2000–2003) was spent with with OpenBB, where I was an active member of the community. I was a staff member from 2003 until the project went defunct in 2006.