On Oct 10, 2024 the RunSignup engineering team was invited to speak at Rowan University’s Chapter of The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). About 30 interested Rowan University students attended the talk with RunSignup’s Benny Chen, Duy Nguyen, Jenn Levas, Julius Leone and Bruce Kratz.
During the first part of the meeting the focus was on “a day in the life of a developer”. The RunSignup developers shared their personal career journeys and also talked about other roles in a typical software product team (aside from developer). We discussed everything from processes and technologies to different engineering cultures. The RunSignup team was impressed with how many students attended and how engaged they were in the dialog – including a one hour personal Q&A after the meeting concluded!
The second part of the meeting was all about the types of engineering challenges we get to solve and we used as an example our recent patent pending work solving complex challenges related to our Multi-Day Timed Entry offering for TicketSignup. We discussed how events such as haunts, corn mazes, festivals, golf outings, airshows and many others have presented exciting verticals where we can provide a superior solution. We outlined the challenges of complex ticket setup with lots of options as well as the possibility that the event may not have an end date (such as a tour or escape room). Not only does this potentially generate a lot of data to store but there are further challenges in presenting this in an intuitive and visual user interface as well as making it perform very, very fast. (We have found that many of the solutions in the market suffer from poor performance due to the vast amounts of data required).
Benny, one of the co-inventors of our Multi-Day Timed Entry patent took the students through his approach to solve this problem. He discussed how thoughtful designs do not happen overnight, require the ideas of lots of his colleagues, and how we evolved through several working designs before we arrived at the one we are using today. Many companies settle for a “working version” and do not continually invest in perfecting their design to really delight customers.
Benny outlined our latest design using relational tables that store just a few rows of rules based data with binary encoding to represent thousands of possible time slots. We also demoed some complex ticket events showing some of the intuitive ways we are presenting data to event directors so that they can intelligently manage their event, maximize revenue, and react to unplanned incidents (such as a rain out or staff shortage). Check out the Multi-Day Timed Entry deep dive to learn more.
Kiley Parker, student president of the Rowan ACM said “We were thrilled to host RunSignup at our ACM meeting. Their presentation provided valuable insights into the workings of a world-class professional software development team, which truly energized and inspired our members. A big thank you to RunSignup for taking the time to visit!”
It was our pleasure and we hope to visit again as we continue our strong relationship with the Rowan Computer Science Department.