derrickfink.com Online · Boise, ID

Derrick
Fink.

Senior Software Engineer at Boise State University. I've spent the last 13 years building web apps, AI tooling, and cloud infrastructure for 30,000+ students, faculty, and staff.

Currently building BSU's digital experience.

I build software that 30k people quietly rely on.

I'm a senior software engineer at Boise State University, where I've shipped everything from BSU's public course search page, to the AI platform behind boisestate.ai, to a travel approval system that replaced a mountain of paper forms.

I've been here 13 years. That's long enough to live with my own decisions — to maintain the code I wrote, debug the assumptions I made, and still be the one on call when something breaks. I didn't build something overengineered and move on to the next startup. I shipped it, and then I kept it running.

Three of us shipped a campus-wide AI platform on AWS and cut per-user cost by 80%. That's the work I like best: small teams, real stakes, production systems that have to work every single day. I just finished my ML graduate certificate, and AWS Solutions Architect is up next.

A few things I've shipped.

BOISESTATE.AI · FEATURED BY AWS

Campus AI Assistant Platform

Open-source, multi-LLM AI platform that powers boisestate.ai across the university. A small team of three of us built it end-to-end on AWS — and cut per-user cost by 80% along the way. AWS wrote about how we did it →

COURSE SEARCH · PUBLIC

Course Search at boisestate.edu

BSU's course data used to live inside PeopleSoft — login-gated and painfully slow even when you got in. I rebuilt it end-to-end as a fast, public search: Angular SSR frontend, fully serverless ETL pipeline, OpenSearch backend, all on AWS Lambda + API Gateway. Now anyone — current students, prospective applicants, even curious parents — can browse every section, time slot, and instructor in real time. Check it out for yourself →

TRAVEL AUTH · INTERNAL

Travel Authorization System

University-wide travel approvals for BSU employees. .NET on AWS. Not flashy, but it saves a lot of people a lot of paperwork — which is the whole point.

The kit I reach for daily.

Angular TypeScript .NET AWS AgentCore Strands SDK OpenSearch

What's on my desk right now.

CERT · Q3 2026

AWS Solutions Architect

Studying for the SAA. A lot of it is formalizing what I already do at work. After this: the AWS GenAI cert.

GOAL · 2026

Half Marathon Training

Progress: ongoing. Setbacks: also ongoing. That's training.

DONE

ML Graduate Certificate

Wrapped up the ML grad cert at BSU. Putting it to work on the AI assistant platform and a few small experiments in between.

Say hi. I read everything.