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Welcome to
Starz Live
Photos, videos, livestream, and everything from your competition weekend — all in one place.
What we built for Starz
A full technology stack custom-built for a touring dance competition. Everything studios, dancers, and families need.
Other things we’ve shipped
How it’s all built
Click any project to see the technical breakdown. Every system below was designed, built, and deployed by one developer.
Handles everything from the moment a video is recorded backstage to the moment a parent downloads it on their phone. 48,000+ files per event, 276K requests/hour at peak, served from a home NAS at 2.5 Gbps.
Customers upload a dance routine video, pay per duration, and a professional judge records an audio critique over the video. The system handles the entire flow — upload, payment, judge assignment, recording, merging, delivery, and rating.
A complete browser-based RPG built in a few months and published on Steam. Explore zones, level up, collect perks, join guilds, fight bosses, compete on leaderboards. Runs in Electron for the desktop client with offline capabilities.
Studios and families book hotel rooms for competition weekends. The system tracks per-night inventory across multiple hotels, processes payments, and generates rooming lists for the venue.
Built specifically for selling merchandise at dance competition events. Runs on iPads at the merch table, connects to a Square Terminal for card payments, handles state-specific tax calculations, and tracks per-size inventory across the season.
Upload a competition schedule PDF and the system parses every routine, calculates medal/pin/certificate counts, lets you drag-and-drop build the event layout, and generates personalized HTML emails for each studio with their schedule, awards times, and improv sessions.
What’s running behind the scenes
☁️ AWS EC2
Ubuntu server running PHP, MySQL, Nginx. Elastic IP, auto-start services, 500 PHP workers for peak traffic. Handles all API calls and business logic.
📦 AWS S3
863GB+ media storage. All uploads go to S3 first, then sync to the NAS automatically via Synology CloudSync. Soft-delete system with 7-day cleanup.
🏠 Home NAS
Synology DS925+ with 32GB RAM and 2 Gbps fiber. Serves ALL media viewing and downloads. Auto-failover to S3 if offline. ZIP downloads built directly from disk.
🔐 SSL & DNS
Let’s Encrypt auto-renewing certs on both EC2 and NAS. GoDaddy DNS. Cloudflare-free — no middleman between users and our servers.
SendGrid for all transactional email — studio notifications, critique delivery, schedule emails, receipts, password resets.
💳 Payments
Square SDK for card processing across POS, booking, and critiques. Apple Pay enabled. Terminal API for physical card readers at events.
Need something built?
Everything on this page was designed, coded, and deployed by one developer. No templates, no agencies, no outsourcing.
Let’s build something.
Payment processing, real-time apps, admin dashboards, mobile-first design, API integrations, inventory systems. If you can describe it, I can ship it. Based in Minnesota, available remotely.
Staff & Admin Tools
Internal links for the Starz team.