Helping a young and fierce, but absolutely kick-ass team, for a few months, to get a bit better organized and confident ... oh they grow up so fast 🥹

What if .... isCompliant(crypto) === true !?

A vertically integrated event management platform (think Shopify for bands, festivals, concerts).As CTO of a truly determined team of 8 people, we continuously refined our processes, fought the usual battles with deadlines, product roadmaps and sales wishlists.Right at the start we hopped on the Python3 train with Flask, adopted TypeScript for AngularJS and end-to-end testing with NightwatchJS (PhantomJS) browser automation. Stored our binary blobs, generated PDFs and a myriad of event photos in Ceph via the S3 protocol. I have fond memories of furiously migrating a low-level C++ Ceph (RADOS) package to NAN (native abstractions for NodeJS), so our service for securely serving tickets would work with a new Node version.The whole stack was "tour ready", just grab a notebook run vagrant up, set up a Wifi AP and use our native Android and iOS QR code reader apps for ticket validation. Don't forget to bring enough battery packs though, we couldn't help with that!We even implemented customizable consistency between offline and online ticket validation. Ah, the crazy startups of yesteryear.

Over the last two years we've been gearing up toward a fully horizontally-scalable (nicely loadbalanced, HA, robust, and all around shiny-shiny) architecture, while I've found myself quite adept and fully capable of meeting the these kind of challenges.The usual startup constraints applied (and they still do) of course, but that also means we're still forced to find the most efficient and rational solution for our growing pains, proof-of-concept it and get it into production as fast as possible, all the while automating as much of the whole process as we can with the usual devops-productivity enhancing tools (from the almost conservative configuration management tools to the cutting-edge event-based load distribution gadgets made possible via virtualization and distributed software engineering support toolkits and libraries from Apache Kafka to CoreOS's fleet).

Junioring and operating. Oh, and engineering stuff.