Building Laracon Online

This will be the third year we’ve been running Laracon Online and I have learned a lot about selling tickets in the process. Based on this tweet I was reminded of how we’ve reworked the order system over these three years and I wanted to share with you the progression.

The first year we used a third party service to sell tickets. For the percentage they would take we assumed it would be a decent deal for us since we wouldn’t have to build out any of the infrastructure. However, I was swamped with support that year. I had hundreds of people entering their email addresses wrong and other weird stuff. It was a nightmare.

From this point we decided we would build our own system for the next year and I tried my best to build the simplest system possible. You hit the /pay route, added all the emails you wanted to buy tickets for, entered your account info, and pay. Behind the scenes we would email all the people and tell them to reset their password to create an account. It was simple and worked great.

Now that we had all this data for this year I was brainstorming on how I could make it even easier for people to purchase and I came up with the idea of just pre-filling the checkout system with all the people you purchased tickets for last year. So if you work at a company buying tickets for 20 people all you have to do is confirm they all are the same and hit buy.

Thinking through all this took some time but the implementation was really straightforward and only took me a night of hacking.

As developers we want to focus on the code and think about how to design apps that are easy for us, but our focus should always be on the end user. Even if it adds complexity or makes our app harder to manage later. The customer is the priority and making their life easy is why we are here.

Everything is always a trade off, just make sure you are prioritizing what is important.