We've made it our mission to become America's gateway to live entertainment. We even put it on our wall, right by the front entrance of our office.
So one area we've focused on is live event recommendations. After all, you can't go see your favorite band if you don't know it's in town.
For the past year, we've been improving the recommendation service that powers our recommendations calendar on seatgeek.com...
...as well as our…
SeatGeek is hiring UI Developers and Web Engineers. Your first tasks will be to make my OAuth application pretty and write some tests for a bit of Lua code... (kidding)
If you have any questions about the project just let us know in the comments!
At SeatGeek we have regularly scheduled Hackathons--opportunities for all of us to drop what we're doing for two days and work on whatever interesting, creative, or experimental projects we dream up. We had a Hackathon last week, and I decided to write a command-line client for SeatGeek, which I called SGCLI.
Back in 2005 I spent a couple of months using a box running FreeBSD without X as my main computer. I'm not sure exactly…
Among all of SeatGeek's features, we have always been proudest of Deal Score, our metric that enables users to seamlessly pick out the best deal for an event from within thousands of ticket listings. But today that feature is getting a whole lot cooler. We're launching Absolute Deal Score, an upgrade that has been under development for many months here at SeatGeek.
For the uninitiated, the premise behind Deal Score is simple:…
Welcome back! In case you missed part one of this series, we're opening up the hood on Deal Score, one of SeatGeek's most popular features.
In part one we gave a brief overview of why we sort ticket listings by Deal Score rather than by price. We gave you our two main assumptions:
Seat quality, within a given venue, has a consistent ordering.
The relationship of seat price to seat quality follows a similar pattern across all events…
Greetings from SeatGeek Research Development!
I'm here today to take you behind the curtain of one of SeatGeek’s major features, Deal Score. For the uninitiated, Deal Score is a 0-to-100 rating that reveals whether a ticket is a great bargain or a major rip-off. We humbly believe it’s the best way to find tickets. I’d like to quickly tell you why and then spend most of this post discussing some of the math behind Deal Score’s…
Over the past two and a half years, we’ve poured countless time into building a canonical database of live events in the US. Not only have we cataloged when and where each event is happening, but we also built a system that attaches copious metadata to each event--e.g., the latitude/longitude of the venue, the number of tickets currently listed, etc. Thus far, that database has been used exclusively to power the pages on SeatGeek.com.…
Screenshot of our initial homepage
When we launched SeatGeek back in the fall of 2009, we positioned ourselves as a site that forecasts how ticket prices move on the secondary market. That was our "one thing": forecasts. Russ had spent months building scrapers to collect ticket data. I'd spent months messing with that data in STATA, building models that could accurately forecast prices. We figured we could get traction by helping…
We've had great success at SeatGeek moving more and more of our software into independent services. Clear service boundaries have allowed us to improve our code quality, increase programmer productivity/happiness, open source a few things, and in some cases, drastically improve performance.
The flip-side is that with 3 or 4 different languages connecting to 3 or 4 different data stores, with the network between them, and all writing…
We recently embarked on a complete redesign of the core page on our site, our ticket listings interface. After weeks of iterating with the other guys on the SeatGeek dev team, I marched off to an interview with a reporter from a major tech publication to show off the new UI for an upcoming story. His reaction: "Well, that doesn't really look very different." Oof.
But he was right. The two versions looked quite similar:
Before…
Devs are gonna dev. Coders gonna code. But they aren't going to write blog posts, which is why I am here...except here, here, here, and here. Aight so they do some content work, but I can't complain at all because they MAKE SeatGeek what it is. I just monkey market.
Programmers tend to prefer house, techo, electro, dub, metal, but let's take a look at what music our actual developers are listening to on a day-to-day basis. In…
You might have heard -- there was an earthquake in Virginia which was felt in New York City. Twitter is exploding with east-coasters experiencing their first earthquake.
Over here at SeatGeek, we were excitedly discussing the tremor when Mike, our trusty sysadmin, realized that our Amazon AWS servers were all in Virginia, right near the epicenter. Did it impact the service at all?
It turns, out, it did. For about six months, we've…
We've made it our mission to pull in event tickets from every corner of the internet, showing you them all on the same screen so you can compare them and get to your game/concert/show as quickly as possible.
Of course, a big problem with most corners of the internet is labeling. One of our most consistently frustrating issues is trying to figure out whether two ticket listings are for the same real-life event (that is, without…
Have you ever felt so close to someone that it seemed like the two of you were finishing each other's sentences? Well, as a Valentine's Day gift to the community, we at SeatGeek have distilled some of Cupid's magic into a Redis-backed service for doing exactly that: Soulmate is a tool for building fast autocompleters.
Give it a try right now on SeatGeek.
Inspired by Auto Complete with Redis, Soulmate uses sorted sets to build…
DJJob is our database-backed job system that allows PHP web applications to process long-running tasks asynchronously. It is a nearly direct port of delayed_job, one of the most popular Ruby/Rails job processing systems.
A few months ago, I went searching for a PHP-friendly equivalent of the many popular queue/worker-based job systems available to Ruby apps. But the best I could find was a few pointers to pcntl_fork. There are…
