DoubleDutch is an award-winning provider of mobile event applications, with a unique focus on capturing and surfacing data from live events. The first to bring a data-driven technology approach to the event industry, DoubleDutch believes in the power of digitizing live engagement to supercharge business outcomes. The DoubleDutch Live Engagement Platform powers events, conferences, and trade shows for more than 1,700 customers including Forbes, Humana, LinkedIn, Novartis, Nationwide, SAP and UBM.

This success didn't come easy. Shipping a large quantity of mobile apps creates interesting technical problems to solve. There's the operational challenge of packaging that volume of apps effectively. There’s the spiky nature of our traffic when tens of thousands of people simultaneously try to log in and slam the API. (Plus we serve millions of customers a year.) There’s our data pipeline that processes billions of data points. We capture taps, swipes, and scrolls and report on them in real time.

And then there’s the fact that we’re coming on those startup awkward teen years where a monolithic codebase won’t scale much further. We’re moving off our .NET stack to more modern technologies, and we’re getting our data, automation, and deployment pipelines in order. Some of our new technologies and tools include: Java, Node.js, Go, Kafka, AngularJS, Postgres, Docker, Microservices, Event-Sourcing, and CQRS.

I joined wercker when they just became one of the first Dutch startups to have raised capital from U.S. from top-tier VCs. They hired me to help growing their business and guide them through a period of rapid growth, from a handful of customers, to thousands of active customers in just a few months. I also was an important counterpartner for the CTO to help solving deep technical challenges and helped the CEO to accelerate growth. I still think a lot about this time and look back with pride. They got acquired by Oracle in 2017.