The problem
Event photos arrive days later, and organizers pay for them as an expense. Venues are often dead zones.
What I built
- Sell first, deliver as photos land, with an offline queue that retries until each photo uploads.
- Checkout to delivery on one tablet, by text, email or QR code.
- A tethered Canon DSLR streaming shots into a live gallery.
Key decisions
- Followed the pull from landmarks to live events, setting aside months of research.
- Treated bad signal as the top product risk.
- Priced per event, in server settings, so prices change without an app release.
Shipping it
I rehearsed all 24 database changes on a copy of production. A test on the real tablet and camera then found three release blockers that 312 passing tests had missed, fixed the same day.
Results
- Piloted at a major music festival, with 6 events lined up.
- In an airplane-mode device test, a photo taken offline uploaded 3 seconds after reconnecting, with no tap.
- The weak-signal delivery system went live in October 2026.