Emerging Vietnam

The problem

The firm’s annual investment conference is a scheduling problem wearing a website. Hundreds of fund managers and listed companies register, each with a view on who is worth their time, and the organisers have to turn that into a grid of one-to-one meetings where nobody is in two rooms at once. Then everyone arrives on the same morning and has to be checked in before the first session starts.

What I did

Nine months on the platform, front to back. On the front end: separate registration journeys for investors and corporates, email verification, accounts, the agenda, speaker profiles, and a ticket that prints with a scannable code. On the back end: the matching engine that fills the meeting grid, the admin tools the organisers run the event from, email campaigns, and spreadsheet export.

The matching engine is where the real work was. The first version went through the CMS document API and fell over on production-sized data, exhausting the database connection pool and hanging the public site while an organiser sat waiting for a slot to close. I moved the hot path onto direct SQL with batched writes, put timing around each phase so a slowdown is something you read rather than guess at, and tuned autovacuum on the tables that churn hardest during matching.

Five of the CMS plugins the project runs on are ones I had already published to npm.

Result

Slot assignment that used to block the site now finishes in one pass, and the operations team runs registration, matching and check-in from the admin panel without a developer on standby.