Building a customized, scalable event platform with interactive engagement features

Overview

This Dot Labs was hired to develop a technology conference platform for an annual conference now held remotely due to the pandemic.

Existing event platforms have not been able to move quickly enough to support the client's needs, nor were they able to support some of the custom engagement features the client wanted to build using their in-house products.

The client had the following requirements:

• Ability for viewers to watch conference content and easily switch between several virtual stages of content based on their ticket type.
• Engagement features to keep the attendees on the platform and help them connect with sponsors and experts
• Support for international viewership including a custom schedule for viewers in different international regions and a translated platform.
• A custom experience for a subset of attendees who attended a special in-person event the day of the conference.

Project Stats

Tech-stack

React

Tailwind CSS

NextJS

GraphQL

Apollo

Serverless

styled-components

Heroku

• The underlying data for the conference was stored and managed in a third-party event CMS system that provided a public API to the data.
• This will allow future iterations of the project to retain the same API signature while allowing the underlying CMS system to be replaced if different solutions become available or necessary.
• The frontend of the application was built using NextJS, Apollo Client, and Taliwind CSS with Styled Components that was deployed via Heroku. NextJS was selected to statically generate the marketing website and help with SEO while supporting server rendered platform pages.
• Apollo Client supported the needed GraphQL queries on the frontend while also supplying a client-side cache and state manager for the application data.
• Additionally, the data was returned in a coded format that required lookups to understand the underlying data.
• The data was required by the main platform application in addition to two additional systems external to the platform and CMS.
• Utilizing the power of Apollo's GraphQL Server in conjunction with the Serverless Framework, our team was able to create a common interface for all three integrations.
• Serverless Framework enabled our team to build all the features required by the API. First, it allowed our team to scale the API in realtime to meet the needs of the conference attendance pool. Due to the CMS's rate limit, we also applied a caching infrastructure using Redis. Additionally, the Serverless Framework created a medium for us to receive custom webhooks from the CMS to update critical information in real time.
• Tailwind CSS with Styled Components made component level styling simple and allowed values to be tokenized globally for easy updates to theming at a later date.

Services Provided

Our team built a fully scalable platform that all conference attendees could use to interact with the conference content.

Features