Inspired by community. Grown organically. Rebuilt for what comes next.
We started just like you. An idea, a passion, and a desire to connect with others and build something that brought our creative vision to life. In 2007 we were making the drive from Buffalo to Ithaca every chance we got for GrassRoots Festival, local shows and long weekends in the Finger Lakes. Back home it was Thursday at the Square and the Buffalo music scene. We were taping shows, shooting photos and writing reviews. We needed a place to put it all, so we taught ourselves to build a website and launched bandsthatjam.com.
That passion project grew into something bigger. GrassRoots gave us our first photo passes. Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad gave us our first real client work. We started Brooks New Media as a way to help others grow like we had. The work grew beyond the music scene: local businesses, law firms, event planners, e-commerce stores. Every project came through a connection, a referral, a handshake.
In 2018 we made the move to Ithaca, the community that had been pulling us in for years. We connected with the GrassRoots Festival team, helped bring Ithaca Reggae Fest online, and put down roots.
The next chapter
Then the tools changed. AI went from a novelty to something that can read a network's configuration, review a pull request or draft a workflow, then stage the change for a person to approve. We started building with it the way we have always built: for ourselves first, in the open, on infrastructure we run. That became mcp-unifi, Writ Protocol, Open Model Arena and more than thirty public repositories, plus DewFront, a live app with a public case study.
It also made Brooks New Media a different company. We still look after the websites our clients already have, and we build a new site only as part of an AI project. Most of the work now is AI agents and MCP servers, and the guardrails that keep them honest.
