UXDX

What the business needed

Several conferences a year, in different cities and time zones. Each has its own agenda, speakers, tickets, partners and thousands of attendees who expect information on time.

A small organising team could not wait for a developer for every change or send hundreds of messages by hand. The site also had to stay fast when everyone arrives at once, on the day tickets go on sale or during an event.

What I built

I worked on both what attendees see and what the organising team uses behind the scenes.

• A full admin panel for running events, speakers, the agenda and content
• A dedicated page for every conference: agenda, speakers, venue, tickets and the live stream
• A chat for attendees, built from scratch
• An automated email system that reaches attendees at the right moment on its own
• E2E tests that check the key paths through the site before every change

Faster, in front and behind the scenes

A large part of the work was optimisation. In the browser, pages load faster and run more smoothly on phones. On the server, data from the database (Firebase, Firestore) is fetched only when needed, which makes the site faster and cheaper to run.

Changes without fear

On a platform that sells tickets, every bug costs money. So I introduced E2E tests: a robot goes through the site like an attendee and checks that everything works before a change reaches people.

That let the team ship new features and event pages often, with little risk of something breaking on conference day.