Almost as a rule, in the US at least, large multi-purpose venues sign exclusive contracts with their ticketing provider. That means that all events, including any concerts that come through the building, are ticketed by the venue's chosen ticketing provider.
While we're probably better known as a consumer app for buying tickets, SeatGeek also builds the full set of software you need to run a major venue. Everything from issuing and managing season tickets for the resident pro sports team, to working with promoters in selling tickets to their national tours and hosting the big, high-demand concert on-sales that accompany them.
A big component of our path into the market is that it's often the resident pro sports team that operates the venue and makes the ticketing decision. They tend to be very focused on the fan experience, particularly for season ticket holders, and that's our strong suit.
I'm pretty intimately familiar with the whole industry. I once owned a small (~2k person) club / live music / multiuse venue in San Francisco as well as built a ticketing SaSS for USCF (us cycling federation) sanctioned events.
From the club days, I got subtly screwed by Clear Channel on an event once and it really left a bad taste in my mouth. From the cycling ticket stuff, I got to deal with another type of promoter and that was horrible in a lot of ways too. Both businesses eventually failed from external factors.
Very cool (well, not the getting screwed part). Most of my experience so far is on the sports side, with music exposure being more indirect.
It's amazing how many ticketing systems of various forms have been built over the years. It seems like one of those things that should be simple, but there are just so many ways to slice it.
The UX for setting up events and selling tickets was some of the most complicated stuff I've ever built. The logic is extremely domain specific and difficult to implement. Good work.
I realize that your primary target is major venues, but do you have any plans for expanding to 200-500 cap venues? A management solution is desperately needed in that space!
I'm guessing you mean music venues? The short answer is yes, eventually.
The slightly longer answer is that we'll probably be the strongest option for smaller venues that want to do more complex stuff. To the extent that there's always some tradeoff between simplicity and power, we're likely to continue to lean pretty heavily on the power side for our core ticketing system.
Heh, I may get overly excited to tell people that we're building a Ticketmaster/Live Nation competitor... The sentiment that one is sorely needed is so common, and yet so few people know we're doing it (the StubHub comparison is more typical)
But latency (mostly) aside, there seem to be a lot interesting use cases for what is more or less programmable CDN configuration. Particularly when you have a relatively straightforward application (architecturally at least), but want to tap into the very distributed, very scalable CDN layer for little bits of critical functionality.
I used Lambda@Edge last week to smooth some rough edges between CloudFront and S3.
S3 is just a HTTP server for CloudFront and S3 in itself is a rather dumb HTTP server. Lambda@Edge allowed me to add some additional features to that integration to make S3 a bit more bearable, like automatic index files and path cleanups.
It was indeed Apple's "Sign In with Apple" deadline that prompted us to make the change (for those who don't know, apps that offer sign in via a third party auth mechanism will also need to offer sign in with Apple), but it's something we've considered on and off for many years.
Two big reasons. The first is that when we work with pro sports teams, fans of that team are able to sign in to their team accounts using SeatGeek. Having Facebook, and potentially Apple, also in the mix there felt like it would lead to a lot of confusion. The second is that while we've seen that sign in with Facebook leads to more sign ups in the first place, we've also seen that it causes confusion for users who are later unsure how they initially signed in, and that confusion can hit just as they're trying to pull up their tickets outside of an event.
Interesting how the title of the FAQ item says "Why can't I sign in with Facebook anymore?", but to get the actual answer to that question, one has to go to HN....
Makes a ton of sense. I’ve experienced and dealt with a lot of customer confusion with Facebook, Google etc sign in where they lose access to that account & then it’s just a cascading failure of whack a mole trying to have them get their account setup etc.
I can imagine how awful it feels to be at the stadium gates (I’ve ran into this on TicketMaster’s lovely app where it can’t pull up the ticket) and you can’t figure out the login while you/your kid/friends wait on you awkwardly. Customer support has to love this decision.
Thanks for the insight on this. As another anecdote, I used Google Sign-In to sign up for a certain popular coding exercise site. I just clicked "Sign In with Google", approved whatever email address access it needed, and done! However, when I later decided to delete my account, the account deletion UI required me to enter my current password twice to delete the account. Because I signed up with Google, I never made a password for this service. I imagine things like this lead to massive confusion for users. I still haven't figured out how to delete the account.
For what it’s worth, Amazon did just have a very public search for an HQ2 location and ended up picking one on the other side of the country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_HQ2
That's actually not the case, estimated tax is due quarterly (ex. for income in Q1 of 2016 for which your employer doesn't withhold taxes, you have to pay estimated tax by April 15, 2016).
It looks like if you have at least 110% your previous year's tax withheld and don't have self employment income you do not need to pay quarterly taxes.
Heh, I always feel a bit bad when people mention this since we're not using it ourselves anymore. Though it's a nice and easy way to get going quickly if you're already running redis (and especially if you've got a rails app).
We're using elasticsearch now which is definitely a bit more of an operational headache.
Curious... why use Elasticsearch over Redis? We're currently using Elasticsearch, but were considering switching to Redis, but now I'm thinking maybe we shouldn't. What's the downside?
My sense is that the Go developer culture is a lot more open to frequently updating their dependencies than the Java developer culture. Fetching dependencies from git is built into Go, after all.
AFAIK GSON (which stripe-java users) also ignores fields which are not present in the destination type, but the original post was about parameters so that's not even relevant: deserialisation would only be relevant for responses.
All you kalman filter fans out there will be happy to hear that you can grab a ride from SideCar and some Giants tickets from SeatGeek[1] for a truly algorithmic afternoon.
