Duesy digitizes ticketing and gate operations for youth sports events. The product takes cash out of the gate — QR scanning, mobile checkout including Apple Pay and ACH, and real-time financial reporting for organizations that were previously counting cash boxes and reconciling them by hand.
I lead cloud infrastructure and reliability as a venture-sponsor engagement through AspirationalX. The platform runs Laravel on AWS Lambda through Vapor with a React frontend, Aurora Serverless, Redis, S3, and Cloudflare, integrating Rainforest for payments and Resend and Twilio for messaging. My work covers monitoring and alerting, dashboards the team can act on, cost attribution and tagging, security and WAF decisions, and review of the codebase and environment setup.
The load pattern is what makes the reliability work concrete. Youth sports happen on weekends, so traffic is sharply spiky against a serverless architecture, and a gate that fails does not degrade gracefully — it becomes a queue of families who cannot get into a game that has already started. That is a more specific constraint than an uptime target, and it drives different decisions.
The shape of the engagement is worth naming too: a small team that owns its product, with outside depth available where infrastructure decisions carry more risk than the team wants to absorb alone. That is the venture-sponsor model rather than staff augmentation.
More context: meetduesy.com