2008 was a heck of a year for kraya, and for me. We were already operating megabus.com in the UK, USA, and Canada, along with Oxford Tube, the sales website for coach usa - all for Stagecoach.

We were also working on the fringe website. We integrated the website with the brand spanking new ticketing system - which cost nearly £900k.

We were also hosting websites for Boots, Kellogg’s Food Service and dozens of other clients.

All of this was held together by three or four developers, two systems administrators and me.

On the 13 June (incidentally, I got married on the same date years later), as I was just getting ready for a wild night on the town, a call comes through - which John answers.

I still remember them laughing and then doing a double take “oh, you’re serious? let me get Shri”

It was the fringe. We’d already known that they were having trouble with their ticketing system. I’d even pitched in, made suggestions - looked at their code to try and help, but none of that was enough. I expected an update.

They wanted to know if we could put together an interim booking system for them over the weekend. I wasn’t sure. I told them I’d speak to my team and get back to them.

I wasn’t involved with the work on the fringe up until this point. I knew very little about it. I was focused on megabus.com. The US version of the site had a big marketing campaign happening in a few days and that was what I was meant to be focused on.

By the time I put the phone down, Chris, who had been the lead on the fringe already had a answer. “We can do it!”

“But how - it’s got to take more than a weekend - right?”

The fringe website was already built well and had a clean layer interfacing with the new ticketing system. In fact, that was the bulk of the work that year.

So.. Chris told me - all we would have to do is to implement the functionality within that thin layer, fattening it up.

He believed we could do it. I believed him.

I hopped in a cab, headed over to the fringe to talk it through. I didn’t promise them we’d be able to get something ready by Monday, but I promised we’d do our best.

We were in the office on the weekend, writing code. I remember working on the basket, sending diffs over email and generally having a good time.

I even had some megabus US fun to keep me entertained in the form of issues with loading sheets - I was already in the office, so it was one step easier to fix.

One of the bits of functionality which took a surprising amount of time was the seat allocation. None of us had to worry about that before - it was just capacity management on megabus. For the fringe though, we had to allocate actual seats with seat numbers and everything.

With the fringe we had multiple tables which all joined together (thanks hibernate) to encode a tremendous amount of detail about the seating plans - including their physical location on a map.

It was too much detail for us, so we had to simplify it all down to get it working in the timeframe. We kept most of the rest of the structures intact to keep the data migration easier once the ticketing system was fixed.

By Monday, we had each managed at the most 6 hours of sleep each of the previous three nights. I still have vivid memories of a suit of armour that we put together using packing material while we were waiting for bits of data or details of logic.

I broke the MySQL replication at 01:24, fixed by 01:32

I remember the delirium setting in. Email sent to the client with “fun fun fun fun fun fun fun” as the subject

There were random emails to my brother “I’m still here!”

I also remember making makeshift beds with bubblewrap to get a wee nap here and there. We were all so exhausted - pumped up on coffee and nicotine.

Finally at 03:35 on the Tue email to client: “DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE NODE NODE NODE NODE”

Then at 05:33, requesting a PostgreSQL server rebuild for megabus US for their marketing campaign.

At 10am on Tuesday, the fringe is finally able to sell tickets. The website promptly fell over from the load, but we nurse it back and it sells 65k+ tickets in the first week.

It would be at least two more weeks before the ticketing system is fixed and brought back in.

For the work we did for them that year, and the previous one, we effectively only charged about 30% - because that’s all they could afford. This year, we asked if they could put our name on the website.

Over the next two weeks(while megabus US was on their marketing campaign), we fought many battles. There were 750 duplicate bookings. Numerous customer complaints (thanks to our name being on the website) - almost all of them blaming us for the failure of the ticketing system. People did not understand that we put in the interim one, not the one that failed.

Press releases went out from the fringe - only two credited us. Both misspelt the company name. Both called us a web design company — which, we were not, had never been, and had no interest in becoming.

In truth, I wanted to be a hero - I think we all did. What we really wanted was an acknowledgement of what we had done - which was nowhere to be found. We got paid though - at least for a part of our effort.

For many years after that, I would tell people with pride - “did you know - I saved the fringe, back in 2008,” which was inevitably met with something like “oh, did they have a problem that year?”