Stories · Season 2
Frontrow
A ticketing startup goes viral and learns about scale the hard way.
Frontrow sells tickets to live events, and for most of its life that was a calm business. Then one reunion show sold out in ninety seconds, and Mara — lead engineer, suddenly of a very popular company — discovered what happens when correct-looking code meets real concurrency.
Season 2 is the season of scale: two people buying the last seat at the same microsecond, a ticket page that hugged the database to death, a nightly job that quietly stopped, a payout that ran on all six servers at once. Ten stories about load, coordination, and time — ending with the question every ops team eventually faces: who did this, and when? — answered precisely, from the log.
The episodes
Episode 01The Two People Who Bought the Last Seat
In which one seat is sold twice, two customers are delighted, and exactly one of them is about to be very unhappy.
Episode 02The Ticket Page That Hugged the Database to Death
In which a band's TikTok goes viral, and Frontrow's database receives more love than it can survive.
Episode 03The Reminder That Arrived a Day Late
In which Frontrow promises to remind you about the show, and keeps that promise at the worst possible moment.
Episode 04The Nightly Job That Quietly Stopped
In which a job runs faithfully every night for two years, stops without telling anyone, and is missed only at tax time.
Episode 05The Payout That Ran Twice
In which Frontrow fixes its single point of failure by running everywhere — and immediately pays everyone twice.
Episode 06The Read Model That Lied
In which the dashboard says one thing, the truth says another, and a bug fixed last month is still poisoning this month's numbers.
Episode 07The Field We Forgot to Add
In which a perfectly good event from three years ago refuses to admit which sales channel it came from.
Episode 08The Customer Who Asked to Be Forgotten
In which a customer exercises their legal right to be erased, and Frontrow's "we never delete anything" architecture meets the GDPR.
Episode 09The Partner Who Spoke a Different Language
In which Frontrow lands a huge partnership, and discovers the partner runs on a message broker Frontrow has never heard of.
Episode 10Who Did This, and When?
In which 5,000 tickets are refunded at 3 a.m. by person or persons unknown, and Frontrow goes looking for answers it can actually find.