Sports & events · 2022–
Race At Your Pace
A complex virtual-events platform with unique ecommerce needs.
- Role
- CTO
- Sector
- Sports & events
- Period
- 2022 – present
- Engagement
- Fractional, ongoing
- Worked with
- GraphQL
Race At Your Pace runs virtual challenges. Pick a distance, do it in your own time, wherever you are, and a medal arrives in the post. There’s no start line and no race day, so the platform is the product. Every entry, mile logged, payment and parcel goes through software.
The job was to own that software end to end: entries and payments, progress tracking, corporate groups running challenges for their teams, and the merchandise and dispatch side that gets a medal into an envelope.
What the work involved
One backend runs the business, behind a single GraphQL API. The website and the mobile app both use that same API, so they never disagree about how far you’ve run, and new features land in both at once.
The less exciting half matters just as much. Corporate customers brought group management, team targets and invoicing. Merchandise meant holding stock and posting thousands of medals a month, each to someone who has earned it and will notice if it doesn’t turn up. It all runs on AWS with automated deployment, built to be run by a very small team (which it is).
No venue and no race day. The platform is the event.
Where it stands
The platform has run the business since 2022: thousands of participants a month, corporate programmes alongside the consumer challenges, and an app and website on the same API. I’m still the fractional CTO, running the roadmap, shipping features and keeping the infrastructure boring.