ComplexCon Hong Kong
The companion platform for the first ComplexCon in Hong Kong had to make six unrelated systems behave like one product — for tens of thousands of people, over three days, with no second chance. I designed the architecture, proved the risky integrations myself, and stood on the floor while it ran.
The problem
A live event is a deadline that does not move. The platform had to handle authentication, ticket ingestion, commerce, engagement mechanics and customer data — each owned by a different vendor, each with its own model of what a "user" is. None of them were designed to work together, and the requirements kept changing as the event took shape.
What I did
- Designed the architecture for the complete system and its integration plan across Salesforce, Asset Layer, WeChat, AWS Cognito, Wagtail and Cityline ticketing.
- Built hands-on proof-of-concepts for the integrations that were technically hardest or least familiar — notably WeChat authentication through AWS Cognito, and the Shopify integration.
- Did the hands-on Shopify work myself: webhook setup, product configuration and store configuration.
- Pre-tested cross-system flows ahead of the event and reworked the design as requirements shifted.
- Provided technical direction to a delivery group of roughly 20 people — cross-functional leadership across the group, not 20 direct reports.
- Gave on-site technical leadership during the event itself, across both technical and operational issues.
The incident worth telling
During a demo trial, the third-party ticketing provider sent purchase data in a format that did not match its own documentation. Thousands of tickets had to be resent — and the provider resent them with no throttling at all, producing a traffic spike that looked indistinguishable from a DDoS.
I helped diagnose the format mismatch and coordinated between the parties so the re-import could complete while the platform stayed up. Every ticket sold through Cityline was successfully imported.
Outcome
The system went into production and ran through the event with no reported problems. It had been stress-tested to support 10,000 concurrent users; roughly 12,000 user accounts were created in AWS Cognito over the course of the event.
Why this one matters to me
Most of the value was not in the diagram. It was in taking the two or three integrations nobody wanted to touch, building them myself early enough that we still had options, and being present when something broke in a way no plan anticipated.