seatgeek open sourced seatgeek/soulmate

Redis-backed service for fast autocompleting

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 an index of partially completed words and the corresponding top matching items, and provides a simple sinatra app to query them.

Here’s a quick overview of what the initial version of Soulmate supports:

• Provide suggestions for multiple types of items in a single query (at SeatGeek we’re autocompleting for performers, events, and venues)
• Results are ordered by a user-specified score<
• Arbitrary metadata for each item (at SeatGeek we’re storing both a url and a subtitle)

Checkout the github repo for instructions on how to use it, or if you’re feeling saucy, just gem install soulmate.

The early stage of the hiring process has a huge signal-to-noise problem. A job posting on one of the standard career sites garners hundreds of resumes, but most are poor, and sorting cruft takes countless hours. Outstanding web developers do not generally spend their time trolling the job listings on Craigslist. They do, however, enjoy puzzles.

Therefore, we’re changing the application process for our web developer position. All applicants must now submit their resume by solving a puzzle: they must hack into our backend jobs admin panel.

Admittedly, this is contrived. We didn’t have a backend jobs admin till last week, when Eric and Mike made it for the purpose of this challenge. But it should be a fun challenge for any dev up to the task. Anyone who successfully submits their resume will be carefully considered. Even if you aren’t looking for a job, feel free to give it a spin and drop us a line at hi@seatgeek.com to let us know what you think.

Note: All errors you run into are intentional. A blank page should be considered an error. If you see a blank page, your resume has not been submitted.

Here’s the job description: https://seatgeek.com/jobs

Note: This challenge has been discontinued.

seatgeek open sourced seatgeek/djjob

Database backed asynchronous priority queue – A PHP port of delayed_job

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 a few language agnostic-systems, but in general they seem more complicated and often rely on additional moving parts.

Delayed_job’s design is attractive because most people are already running a SQL db, and storing jobs in the db instantly buys you a pretty full featured job management system in phpMyAdmin.

The result is that we decided to port delayed_job to PHP and bring simple, robust job processing to PHP web apps.

Take a look at the github repo to see how to use it and to get the code.

A few days ago we publicly launched SeatGeek at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. We got up on the main stage at TC50 and, in front of a live audience of 2,000+ and a streaming audience of another 8,000+, we described what SeatGeek does and how we think we can revolutionize the way people buy tickets. And then, right after we hopped off stage, Russ FTP’ed a few files and voilà, the site went live. Here’s a link to the presentation video.

Things have been quiet on this blog recently; apologies for that. TC50 is a superb event for startups, but the participation requirements stipulated we not talk publicly about our business nor our forthcoming launch. So, instead of awkwardly blogging about SeatGeek without even saying what the hell we do, Russ and I put our heads down and focused on making the site as useful and stunning as possible for our public launch.

But, thankfully, the moratorium has now been lifted. So expect more activity here. We’ve gotten some great positive press after our launch, nearly all of it positive, including articles by the LA Times, Fast Company, VentureBeat, and CNET.

Near term plans for Russ and I include:

• Building our team by hiring a CTO and a few developers
• Raising money–we’ve begun raising a seed round of 500K-1M
• Adding NFL forecasts. They’re nearly ready, and they’re looking awesome.
• Launching our premium broker service, SeatGeek Pro