Humble
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View case study , HumbleCase study · Event discovery
EventsDF
A personalised feed of tech events from around the world, where the engineering problem turned out to be relevance at speed on a database not built for it.
Delivered · Handed over
- Engagement
- MVP engineering partner
- Platforms
- Web application
- Role
- Engineering, client-led design
- Outcome
- Delivered and handed over Verify before publishing
- Industry
- Event discovery
- Users
- Technology professionals
- Content
- Conferences, webinars, recordings
- Platforms
- Web
- Role
- MVP engineering
- Status
- Handed over
01The business situation
The events all exist. Finding the right one does not.
Tech events are scattered across conference sites, meetup listings and social posts, and no single view of them exists. The founder, Rakesh Ranjan (a YC ’18 graduate and IT industry veteran, already committed to an MVP approach) wanted to test one thing: whether a curated, personalised feed would earn enough engagement to justify a product. That meant the platform had to feel useful before anyone signed up.
Core challenge
Make a large, messy corpus of worldwide events searchable and personally relevant, fast, and without forcing a login first.
Before
Events scattered across sites, feeds and word of mouth
- Conference Sites
- Meetup Listings
- Social Posts
- Word of Mouth
After
One personalised, searchable view of what is happening
- Curated Feed
- Search
- Recommendations
- Social Context
EventsDF Platform
02The system at a glance
One feed. Four connected parts.
- Discovery Feed Recommended and trending events
- Open Access Browsable without an account
- Relevance Search Keyword search across the corpus
- Social Context Related posts alongside events
Core PlatformCurated corpus with tuned relevance ranking
- Event Curation
- Personalised Feed
- Full-text Search
- Interest Matching
- Social Integration
- Spam Protection
03Workflow 01
Useful before you sign up.
The feed is open. A visitor can browse recommendations and trending events without an account, because asking for registration before demonstrating value is how a discovery product dies.
assets/portfolio/eventsdf/workflow-feed.png · 16 / 11
- No login wallLists and recommendations are accessible before registration, so the value is visible first.
- Upcoming and recorded togetherPast sessions worth watching sit alongside events still to come.
- Personalised by interestThe feed adapts to a visitor’s declared interests and skill level.
04Workflow 02
Relevance was the real problem.
Search had to rank a large corpus meaningfully and return fast. The chosen database made that harder than expected, and the fix was a hand-tuned query rather than a change of architecture.
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1Keyword search
Image placeholder Search interface: a keyword query with filters for event type, date and topic. assets/portfolio/eventsdf/step-search.png · 1 / 2.04 -
2Ranked results
Image placeholder Search results ordered by relevance, each event showing its type, date and topic tags. assets/portfolio/eventsdf/step-results.png · 1 / 2.04 -
3Event detail
Image placeholder An event detail view: schedule, description, topics and the related social posts for that event. assets/portfolio/eventsdf/step-detail.png · 1 / 2.04
05Workflow 03
An event is more interesting with its conversation.
Alongside each event the platform collects the relevant social chatter, which is often where the actual signal about whether something is worth attending lives.
- Conversation as signalRelated posts sit next to the event, giving a reader more than the official description.
- Social sign-inRegistration runs through existing accounts rather than another password.
- Spam kept outPublic forms are protected so an open platform does not fill with noise.
assets/portfolio/eventsdf/social-context.png · 16 / 10
assets/portfolio/eventsdf/preferences.png · 1 / 2.04
06Engineering behind the product
The system behind a relevant feed.
A conventional stack with one genuinely awkward problem in the middle of it, solved by understanding the database rather than replacing it.
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Full-text search under constraint
Search was built on the database’s own full-text capability to meet the timeline, accepting it as an interim step toward a dedicated engine.
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Hand-tuned relevance
The ORM could not express the ranking the product needed, so the query was written directly to balance relevance against speed on a large corpus.
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Personalised feed
Recommendations are shaped by declared interests and skill level rather than by popularity alone.
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Open browsing
Lists and recommendations are reachable without authentication, which was a deliberate product decision with caching implications.
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Asynchronous processing
Curation and periodic work run through a task queue outside the request cycle.
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Social authentication
Sign-in runs through several established identity providers.
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Spam protection
Public forms are protected against automated abuse across all their entry points.
07Technical architecture
Under the hood
A Django platform whose relevance ranking was hand-written against MySQL full-text search to meet the MVP timeline.
Backend
- Python 3.x
- Django
- Django REST Framework
Frontend
- VueJS
Data & search
- MySQL
- SQL full-text search
- Custom relevance queries
Async
- Celery
Integrations
- Google, Facebook & LinkedIn sign-in
- Google reCAPTCHA
08Delivery journey
How the platform was delivered.
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MVP scoping
Agree the features that test the idea
-
Design
Client-supplied designs, extended by us
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Team setup
A small backend and frontend team
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Sprints
Agile scrum against a defined backlog
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Testing
Validate before release
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MVP release
Ship with the feature set agreed
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Handover
Transition the project to the client
Two phases were delivered. After a stable second phase the client chose to continue development in-house, and we supported the transition. Dates and durations are withheld until confirmed. Verify before publishing
09What the system enabled
What the delivered platform enabled
- Tech events from around the world in one curated view
- A feed personalised by interest and skill level
- Keyword search with workable relevance at speed
- Browsing without a registration wall
- Social context attached to individual events
- Two delivered phases and a supported handover
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