Backlit at the Super Bowl
Only engineer on site for the Super Bowl LX halftime show. Took the slowest pages from 10+ seconds to under 400ms.
- role
- Full Stack / Forward Deployed Engineer (seasonal contract)
- when
- seasonal, 2018-26
- stack
- Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Twilio, Zeal, Yardstik
- links
- backlit.com
- 10s → 400ms page loads
- 500+ → ~10 database queries per page
- 100% of the halftime show's non-union performers paid through the platform
- $2M+ in donations for Boys & Girls Clubs of America
Backlit runs talent logistics for big live productions: onboarding, scheduling, payments and compliance for 10,000+ performers across the Super Bowl, the Oscars and the Grammys. I worked with them every event season for seven years, on contract, alongside my full-time jobs.
On site at Super Bowl LX
For the Super Bowl LX halftime show I was the only engineer on site. I ran talent check-in on the platform, watched where the workflow was slowing people down, and turned what the operations team needed into same-day fixes.
10 seconds to under 400ms
Under the live-event deadline, some pages were taking more than 10 seconds to load. The cause was a classic N+1: one page was making 500+ database queries.
I rewrote the SQL and the ActiveRecord usage behind those pages and got them down to about 10 queries each. Load times went from 10+ seconds to under 400ms.
Getting people paid and cleared
- Paid 100% of the halftime show's non-union performers through the platform, using Zeal for payroll.
- Integrated Twilio for messaging, Yardstik for background checks, and the NFL's SEMS APIs for event compliance.
Earlier events
During COVID, the Oscars needed a contactless way to coordinate people at the Dolby Theatre. I built an SMS system on Twilio that coordinated 200+ of them.
Boys & Girls Clubs of America
Through Backlit I also built the donation flow for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America's 2021 fundraiser, in Node.js and Express with Stripe. It took in over $2 million.