The Brief
NBA All-Star 2020 was coming to Chicago. Alongside the event came a logistical challenge familiar to any large-scale live experience: how do you track ticket transactions in real time, compare them against revenue targets, and give decision-makers an accurate financial picture as the event date closes in?
The answer needed to work on mobile, talk to a database instantly, and surface meaningful reporting without anyone having to pull a manual report.
The Stack
The mobile layer was built in React Native — a natural choice for a cross-platform ticketing interface that needed to feel native without doubling the development effort. Every ticket transaction captured by the app was forwarded in real time to a SQL database, creating a live ledger of sales as they happened.
On the backend, a Laravel controller ran the intelligence layer. On every new sale, it would pull the latest transaction data, compare it against the pre-configured revenue goals and budget targets, and produce a running ROI calculation. Stakeholders could check in at any point and see not just raw numbers, but how those numbers stacked up against projections.
Why Real Time Mattered
The value here wasn't just convenience — it was agility. When you know your actual pacing against targets weeks before an event, you can make decisions. Price adjustments, promotional pushes, reallocation of marketing spend. Static reports that arrive after the fact tell you what happened. A live dashboard lets you respond to what's happening.
That's the distinction this system was designed to deliver.
What I Took Away
This project reinforced something I've come back to many times since: the most valuable thing a piece of software can do is compress the time between a thing happening and a decision-maker knowing about it. The technology itself — React Native, Laravel, SQL — was straightforward. The architecture decision to make everything real time rather than batched was what made it genuinely useful.
Speed of insight is its own competitive advantage.
