I’m Derek Florimonte. I untangle complicated systems for a living, and in my own time I make electronic music, build things from wood and resin, keep bees and gardens, and gather curious people around a fire. Take a wander through the workshop.
Enter the workshop ↓The site is less a résumé than a map of the things I keep returning to: systems, music, land, making, people, and whatever strange project is next.
I’ve built my career around complicated technology and the humans trying to use it.
Solutions engineering, automation, AI, technical consulting and implementation all sit in the same place for me.
Understand the real problem. Make the system legible. Help people build something that works.
Automation & integration.
Years spent helping teams turn messy business processes into working technical systems.
Technical discovery.
Finding the actual constraint underneath what a customer initially asks for.
AI & emerging tools.
Working where products are still evolving and the implementation path is not always obvious.
It usually starts with a question I can’t quite leave alone.
So I build the smallest thing that could answer it, with code, APIs, data, automation and AI.
Then I open the doors and test it against the real world.
Welcome to the lab. Here’s what the questions turned into.
Projects start with a question I can’t quite leave alone. I use code, APIs, data, automation and AI to turn those questions into tools I can actually touch and test.
A Python data project comparing hundreds of U.S. housing markets using home values, rents, gross yield, growth and a composite market score.
A market-intelligence concept combining movement, news, creator and investor signals, business health and other evidence into researchable alerts rather than a single noisy indicator.
Designing and deploying real websites, learning modern hosting and DNS, wiring forms and using AI as a collaborator in the build process, including this site itself.
A found branch carved into a wand, a redwood case split and hollowed by hand, a 3D-printed wax seal and a letter from a fictional order. My first project report.
An open slot on purpose. The laboratory is supposed to keep changing. Right now that includes Hive Signals: recording sound and vibration from my own beehive and mapping it to amplitude, color and geometry that respond to the data, with the mapping built to move into other audio and visual media.
After all the screens, growing is a system I can actually touch: soil, water, light and time, each one feeding the next.
Bees, beds and jars of mead each keep their own loops. I tend them, and mostly I pay attention.
Water, soil and weather run through all of it. Tending that cycle feeds you in more ways than one.
Then it all comes back around as food on a table. Nourishing and bringing people together is the point.
The counterweight to screens. Growing, fermenting, propagating, keeping bees and learning the systems underneath food, water and the places we live.
Pollinators, hive systems, honey and learning how to care for a small superorganism.
Food growing, peppers, tomatoes, watermelon and the yearly experiment of getting better at it.
Indoor plants, lighting, propagation and building living environments inside.
Wild blackberry mead, preservation and learning to work with biological processes instead of against them.
Small practical experiments that can eventually connect to larger systems: waste, food, energy, materials and resilience.
Still forming. A future project about one of the systems beneath nearly everything else.
COMING LATER
Music is where exploration, identity, technology and community collide. Two personas sit at opposite ends of the same horizon, with a much larger world of discovery between them.
Warm, global, playful and communal. Music for the part of the evening when the light is still changing and everyone is arriving.
Hypnotic, psychedelic and deeper. Repetition, perception and the stranger internal side of dance music.
An ongoing attempt to discover electronic and dance traditions geographically across Africa, MENA, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and beyond, rather than treating the genre as a narrow Western map.
A collaborative festival world involving DJs, friends, fabrication, lighting, ESP32 electronics, interactive staffs, visual identity and the small details that turn a gathering into a place people remember.
Some of my favorite moments, and nearly all of my favorite people, started with someone saying a half‑formed idea out loud.
I’d love to build more rooms like that: places where a gardener, a coder, a DJ and a psychologist can pull up a seat, trade ideas, make something together, and leave a little more connected than they arrived.
If that sounds like your kind of place, you’re already invited. That’s the idea behind The Curious Consortium, a Santa Rosa meetup for creative, curious people. First meetup coming soon. Pull up a seat
Belonging comes first. Come as you are, stay as long as you like, and help the circle feel bigger than any one person in it.
Skills stack. A gardener, a coder and a sound designer can solve something none of them could alone, so we build in the open and invite each other in.
Make the strange thing. Prototype, play, let the first version be rough. Curiosity is the only prerequisite.
Open notebooks, open hands. What you learn travels further when you pass it on, and a question asked out loud usually helps three other people.
Curiosity over ego. Every background has something to teach, and we look after each other, because trust is what makes everything else possible.
Something you’re thinking about.
Something you’re building.
Something you don’t understand yet.
Technologists · gardeners · psychologists · musicians · engineers · artists · makers · sustainability people · entrepreneurs · and whoever else has something worth exploring.
Look out for one another. The work, the music and the gardens all come after that.
Also: Take the work seriously. Yourself, considerably less so.
Every project in one list, plus The Curious Consortium, a Santa Rosa meetup for creative, curious people. First meetup coming soon.
If something here sparked an idea, a question or a “wait, I’m working on something like that” moment, I’d genuinely like to hear it. Collaborations, projects, sets, gardens, hives, weird experiments, or just saying hi.