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Interesting. Are you comfortable sharing any architecture details? Im half wanting to do the same for a local fair that had a high friction ticket system. I was

Interesting. Are you comfortable sharing any architecture details? Im half wanting to do the same for a local fair that had a high friction ticket system. I wasnt happy with any designs I came up with though

joshstrange 2y ago
Sure! It's QR-based, so customers create an account, load money onto their account, then show their QR code to vendors who scan it to charge their account. We also provide plastic cards (think: gift card) for people who don't want to use their phone but we see 80%+ of people interact completely on their phone/online. We have an app and website (same codebase, Quasar framework) and for in-person payment (entry, bar) we provide iPads with connected CC readers. My best advice is this: your hardest challenges will not be technical in nature. The hardest part is the equipment, dealing with customers, hand-holding the festival organizers. I don't say any of that as some gross thing or bad thing, just reality. In fact, I think I've succeeded larged based on the in-person aspect (We travel to the event and are on-site for the event) and being the "I have all the answers for your festival payments"-person. Rolling with the punches is a huge part of it. The whole thing runs on AWS Lambda with a postgres DB from Neon.tech. I'll be honest, it's incredibly over-architected, the whole thing could run a a couple (or even 1) servers as a traditional NodeJS app without issue (and with less complexity) but I used this project as learning experience and a chance to try our some technology I was interested in. Lambda is incredibly cool and I think I might have one of the best use-cases for it (incredibly spikey load: no traffic for 9 mo, tiny traffic for presales for 1-2 months, 1 month with higher sales, then 1-2 days of the event with crazy sales) but the debugging story isn't the best. SST makes it 10000x better than anything else I've tried and the developer experience is bar-none for writing lambdas but all the other crap (CloudFormation, logs, monitoring, etc) is so much overhead. If I was writing this again today I'd probably look at something like NestJS but I won't let myself re-write the code (again) without a pressing reason and if I need to spend time anywhere it's sales/marketing. Here is my, crappy, "marketing" website: https://grubbux.com/ https://grubbux.com/
- JamesSwift 2y ago
  Awesome, thanks for sharing
- ManuelKiessling 2y ago
  I think I might just have downvoted you because I‘m a clumsy idiot. So let me just say I love these honest no-bullshit posts!
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    Thank you! I appreciate you saying that. I love geeking out over my "stack" or talking about the business stuff, it's been rollercoaster and a huge learning experience for me. Really upended a ton of preconceptions I had about a number of things.
- jf93ap29sh 2y ago
  Good for you man, happy to hear about your success and pains. A sign of maturity is realizing the tech is always the easy part.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  Festival-goers can just pay for their food direct as well? Sorry, I don't understand your offering at all and the questions just sort of keep coming! I see you combine payments, but I'm struggling to see the real-terms benefit over a tap-payment (card, watch or phone)? For a food stand, it would seem, not taking the money directly is a relatively large potential liability. Is the point to enforce a contract between vendors and the festival? Does the festival pay the food stands [something] up front? How's your liability insurance? Or do the festivals underwrite you for when Amazon/wifi is down and no-one can pay for their meals? (I did see you tout live updates, so transactions must be networked) Sounds easy to abuse (show someone else's code?), have you had much fraud? You're in USA? Did you need a banking license? Small festivals in UK would be 4-8000 people, say; average food spend is probably £20+ per day -- are you carrying a debt to food providers for £500,000+ over a long weekend (consolidating payments)? Fascinating. Do you do non-food transactions too - souvenir stands, onsite shops, [festival] activities? Like some festivals include a number of tokens and you can buy activities with them at the festival.

joshstrange 2y ago

Sure! It's QR-based, so customers create an account, load money onto their account, then show their QR code to vendors who scan it to charge their account. We also provide plastic cards (think: gift card) for people who don't want to use their phone but we see 80%+ of people interact completely on their phone/online. We have an app and website (same codebase, Quasar framework) and for in-person payment (entry, bar) we provide iPads with connected CC readers. My best advice is this: your hardest challenges will not be technical in nature. The hardest part is the equipment, dealing with customers, hand-holding the festival organizers. I don't say any of that as some gross thing or bad thing, just reality. In fact, I think I've succeeded larged based on the in-person aspect (We travel to the event and are on-site for the event) and being the "I have all the answers for your festival payments"-person. Rolling with the punches is a huge part of it. The whole thing runs on AWS Lambda with a postgres DB from Neon.tech. I'll be honest, it's incredibly over-architected, the whole thing could run a a couple (or even 1) servers as a traditional NodeJS app without issue (and with less complexity) but I used this project as learning experience and a chance to try our some technology I was interested in. Lambda is incredibly cool and I think I might have one of the best use-cases for it (incredibly spikey load: no traffic for 9 mo, tiny traffic for presales for 1-2 months, 1 month with higher sales, then 1-2 days of the event with crazy sales) but the debugging story isn't the best. SST makes it 10000x better than anything else I've tried and the developer experience is bar-none for writing lambdas but all the other crap (CloudFormation, logs, monitoring, etc) is so much overhead. If I was writing this again today I'd probably look at something like NestJS but I won't let myself re-write the code (again) without a pressing reason and if I need to spend time anywhere it's sales/marketing. Here is my, crappy, "marketing" website: https://grubbux.com/ https://grubbux.com/

JamesSwift 2y ago
Awesome, thanks for sharing
ManuelKiessling 2y ago
I think I might just have downvoted you because I‘m a clumsy idiot. So let me just say I love these honest no-bullshit posts!
- joshstrange 2y ago
  Thank you! I appreciate you saying that. I love geeking out over my "stack" or talking about the business stuff, it's been rollercoaster and a huge learning experience for me. Really upended a ton of preconceptions I had about a number of things.
jf93ap29sh 2y ago
Good for you man, happy to hear about your success and pains. A sign of maturity is realizing the tech is always the easy part.
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
Festival-goers can just pay for their food direct as well? Sorry, I don't understand your offering at all and the questions just sort of keep coming! I see you combine payments, but I'm struggling to see the real-terms benefit over a tap-payment (card, watch or phone)? For a food stand, it would seem, not taking the money directly is a relatively large potential liability. Is the point to enforce a contract between vendors and the festival? Does the festival pay the food stands [something] up front? How's your liability insurance? Or do the festivals underwrite you for when Amazon/wifi is down and no-one can pay for their meals? (I did see you tout live updates, so transactions must be networked) Sounds easy to abuse (show someone else's code?), have you had much fraud? You're in USA? Did you need a banking license? Small festivals in UK would be 4-8000 people, say; average food spend is probably £20+ per day -- are you carrying a debt to food providers for £500,000+ over a long weekend (consolidating payments)? Fascinating. Do you do non-food transactions too - souvenir stands, onsite shops, [festival] activities? Like some festivals include a number of tokens and you can buy activities with them at the festival.