A couple of years ago Rich Friedman, Stephen Sigwart and I (Bob Bickel) spun off a technology company called RedLine13 from RunSignUp. We felt we had developed a couple of cool pieces of technology that a broader community would be interested in – Load Testing and a ZipCode API.
In the old days it would have made sense to put that code out as Open Source, but with the emergence of the Cloud we wanted to try a different way. So we made both services available for free. We worked on both projects as weekend projects and as we developed better features we came out with low cost “Pro” versions that cost between $99 and $2,500 per year.
Today we have thousands of free users and hundreds of paid users. Rich Friedman had been a part time advisor to RunSignUp, and had a full time job as a CTO and VP of Engineering at a top 2,000 website and mobile app. A few months ago Rich left his job and is now the CEO of RedLine, and has hired another person to help him. Stephen and I still do some work on the project on the side.
The reason why this is of interest to RunSignUp users is not because RunSignUp makes sure we scale by testing 50,000 users registering in 7 minutes with RedLine, or because we power our Race Calendars that show all races in a 50 mile radius of a running store with the RedLine ZipCode API, or because registration is faster on RunSignUp because users enter their zipcode and we lookup their city and state with the ZipCode API, or because we have a cool RedLine-powered Map of activity on our site. The reason is the new RaceDay Photos project!
RaceDay Photos is a huge project that uses the latest technology – a “serverless architecture”. We are developing this project in collaboration with Rich and RedLine. The reason is that the need to do photo storage and processing is pervasive across many applications and industries beyond RunSignUp.
RedLine Photos will have the capability to spin up a photo infrastructure in the RunSignUp Amazon environment as well as in other environments. This means it will setup the S3 storage buckets, the ElasticSearch metadata repository and the Lambda processing agents on RunSignUp. We will integrate those into the Race Director Dashboard, Race Websites and Widgets to give the type of functionality races need like photo galleries, results posting, bib tagging, etc. This splitting of responsibilities gives us great leverage in making much faster progress on the Photo project than we could imagine doing before. We also get Rich’s experience from developing a previous system that processed 500,000 images a day.
Stay tuned as we get ready to launch this exciting new platform, while having technology we help build used by many others.
