Scaling Ticketfly for ever bigger live Events

Achievements  

• Grew the client base to more than 2000 clients
• Successfully handled increasing event size (e.g. 150K visitors competing for 20K tickets in Burning Man main sale alone)
• Increased product development throughput by planning and executing the migration from a data center to the AWS cloud

Story  

Ticketfly was an event ticketing platform providing independent venues, small arenas and festivals such as Burning Man with a fully integrated solution for event management, web presence, marketing and online ticket sales. Ticketfly was acquired by Pandora for $450M in 2015 and later acquired by Eventbrite in 2019.

Ticketfly’s client base grew fast and the business was eager to add bigger and bigger venues and festivals to its client base. Online ticketing is a bit like setting yourself up for a DDOS attack, everyone will come when the tickets go on sale at the advertised time. Burning Man was amongst the most demanding with 20,000 tickets and 150,000 visitors for the main on-sale alone.

As engineer number 6, owner of the inventory and payment systems, I had to quickly assess the existing services which were failing repeatedly and re-architect them to handle the ever increasing load, going deep into the framework and technologies we used. I ended up contributing to most of the platform (frontend, backend, infrastructure) and an aspect that differentiated me from my colleagues is that I could positively influence the process, organization as well as the product.

The constant learning and the realization of a vision into technology is why I am in this business.