The Tech behind the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race (Interview!)

To start the new year with a bang, we have a live interview with Damian, on his work building and running the high traffic, high pressure, prestigious Rolex Sydney to Hobart yacht race tech, site and race tracker:
https://rolexsydneyhobart.com/

James and Francis will be interviewing Damian and we'll cover the history, architecture, load, design, live GPS data from boats, etc. Of course, questions in the chat will be most welcome and answered live!
(It is a C# codebase)

Besides the usual Jetbrains giveaway, we're excited to be giving away Programmable Tickets as an extra treat.

https://www.programmable.tech/

More info:

23 Years on a leaky boat - Lessons from a long lived codebase

Ever had to support and maintain code you wrote 20 years ago? Ever had to live with your architecture decisions for a long time? Have you ever had to evolve a large system over time because there’s never time or budget for the “big rewrite”?

For bonus points, have you ever done this on a website for a live event that has to be ready on time, with very little opportunity to test things, and gets “boatloads” of traffic?

This is Damian Maclennan’s story of running the website for the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race for over two decades.

It’s a story about scaling, evolutionary architecture, pulling all nighters, debugging under load, and being the one person operations team for a site where at any time you could be juggling web traffic spikes, video stream encoding, audio streaming, processing GPS position data, and tuning a prediction engine. All while taking phone calls on a day when your family are sitting around eating leftover Christmas dinner.
We’ll talk about the battle scars and lessons about evolving, scaling, and managing systems, as well as (if you can excuse the pun) “shipping” under pressure.

Stream at: https://www.twitch.tv/sydneyaltnet