On 9 June 2008, the Edinburgh Fringe put its new ticketing system live. It had cost over £800,000 and taken the best part of a year. By the next day, it was clear it couldn’t serve more than one customer at a time.
The world’s largest arts festival had 2,088 shows to sell, tickets already on sale, and eight weeks until it opened.
The call
On the Friday evening, the phone rang. John answered, laughed, then did a double take: “Oh — you’re serious. Let me get Shri.”
They asked if we could build an interim booking system over the weekend.
The website was already there — cleanly structured, with a thin interface layer written to talk to the failed system’s API. The stubs existed; they just needed reimplementing against the database directly. Chris, who’d led the Fringe website, had worked it out before the call ended.
“We can do it.”
We started that night.
The build
Five people, Friday night to Tuesday morning. Good bones, and the scope was contained deliberately: booking only, not full ticketing parity.
The hardest part was reserved seating. Megabus had none — just capacity management. The Fringe had seating charts, physical locations, joined tables encoding more detail than there was time to honour. We simplified it to what would work, keeping the structures intact for the migration.
Pivotal’s data arrived late and in the wrong shape. We reshaped it.
At 01:24 on Tuesday, MySQL replication broke. We fixed it by 01:32.
At 03:35, the email to the client: “DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE”.
At 05:33, a request to rebuild a PostgreSQL server for megabus US — a marketing campaign was coming.
What happened next
At 10am, the Fringe went on sale. The site fell over under load; we nursed it back. It sold 65,000 tickets in the first week, 150,000 before the permanent system returned two weeks later.
The incumbent went into administration after the festival.
What it was
A working booking system for the world’s largest arts festival, built in three days by a team that had never built reserved seating — while scaling another client’s infrastructure on another continent.
I wrote about it here: Did They Have a Problem That Year?