DIYing My Wedding The Hacker's Way

Speaker 0: Hello. My name is Kevin. I run developer relations at Directus. But the reason I say that more specifically is because my past life, as I mentioned to some of you earlier, was running an events agency. I've run over 300 hackathons, meetups, conferences, workshops, on behalf of clients.

So we're actually gonna start this by talking about the basic recipe for every single event regardless of format. Firstly, you need a reason for people to meet. Here, it's because we are interested in some way, shape, or form about directors. You need a place and a time, and you actually need people to be in the space for the reason that you're gathering them. Everything else above that is actually extra.

You know, the food, the drinks, it's extra. We don't need it. The stickers, we don't need it. We don't need anything else. As long as people, you know, know what to expect, that's all good.

And remember, I have run events 100 of times over, which means organizing a wedding should be simple. Right? This is right in my wheelhouse. Basically, what I wake up to do in the morning. I'm gonna spoil it for you and tell you that, no, I was cocky and I thought it was easier than it was.

But before we realized that, my wife and I were in too deep. We we were organizing our own wedding. But we did have one thing on our side, and that is the fact that we are huge nerds and we like to hack together little solutions to problems in our lives. So this talk is going to take us through some of those little projects that we built to try and make that day easier easier to to run. Yeah.

Run. Let's use the word run. So firstly, we already had the reason to meet, obviously. We already sorted the venues and dates, so we just needed the people. And that starts, of course, with weddings, with sending out wedding invites.

Now the first big difference we realized with a wedding is that unlike tech events, people expect invites to feel quite personal to them. But we also need to gather data consistently from them, which is often difficult if you're using physical media. And one other quirk with our setup is that we had the ceremony, you know, the I do and then we had the reception, the party bit afterwards. And the ceremony venue could only hold about a quarter of the people as our reception venue. So immediately, we effectively had a ticket type, 2 ticket types.

We had one that brought people to the whole day and we had one just for people coming to the reception. This is actually very common. I I didn't realize upfront so I feel less bad about it in hindsight. But we have these 2 ticket types. Another variable is that not every guest was given a plus one.

We did this to manage budgets, guest lists. You know, we wanted to know people who were coming, so that's that's important. This was a case by case. So not everyone got a plus one. So once again, there's another variable on a ticket type.

And the final consideration of an event that is somewhat unique to other events that I've run is that one person will often act as the coordinator for a whole group. I will not send an invite to my mom and an invite to my dad. I'll send an invite to my parents, and realistically, one of them is gonna take take point on on, you know, accepting on behalf of the party, but organizing plans on behalf of the whole party. But we also needed to know out of that party who's coming and who isn't because it isn't a given that everyone's gonna come or everyone is not going to come. So it's all these interesting variables, that made this actually quite a complex delivery, let's call it.

I'm very much talking like an event organizer here. Very complex delivery. So how do we make this happen? I work for Directus. So, of course, I use Directus, which I think means I got to plan my wedding at least partially on work time.

So we set up we set up a table for individuals individuals, and that in that included the, the name, dietary, and access requirements for an individual, whether or not they were coming, and whether this person was a plus one. I'm really happy we added this filled up front because as as we got closer, I looked at the list and went, who the fuck is that a couple of times. Fortunately, they were marked as a plus one. And we'll talk about it in a moment. They were linked to an invite so I could work out who's plus one they were.

Right? So that that was that was worthwhile. We also had a wellness certification, which we'll talk about a little bit later. Now each invite had a slug, which we used in the URL for the custom invites, some nice custom text so we can, you know, write a little message that's a little more personal to them, a link to 1 or more of those people, a pair of booleans to dictate whether this invite included an invite to the ceremony, whether or not they were given a plus one, and lead contact phone number and email address. We don't need that for every individual, just the person taking taking, you know, taking point for the for the group, and a date field on which that invite was used, which we effectively checked if it was null, if it wasn't used, and if it was used if it had a date value it had been used and we knew when.

So I took, I did all of this in a spreadsheet, wrote a one off script to drag it all into direct us. Fantastic. Now, a set of invites, we have a set of people, or the other way around. Set of people and a set of invites. And the other part of this invite system was a web application.

It was an express app. You used view on the front end, used the direct us SDK to render out invite pages and actually accept the responses. Here's an example of what a basic invite looked like. So this person, we still love them very much, of course, but they're only coming to the reception and they don't get a plus one. So this is this is what that looked like.

So each person RSVPs yes or no. Anyone who says yes, we ask for their dietary and or access requirements. The group phone number, the group email address, you hit send. And we try to get everyone to respond to this even if the answer was just them going, no, nope, submit. And at least we know where we stand.

This is an example of what I'll call a fully loaded invite. This person gets a plus one. They also get invited to both parts of the day. There's a bit more information up there. And you'll notice this box here, they say they want to they want to bring a plus one, you know, they they have to not everyone we gave that ability to did, and then they give us information about the plus one.

First name, last name, dietary, and access. Once again, it's expected that one person will still take point for the whole group including the plus one. On submit, we update each person attached to that invite. We create a new person if they're a plus one and immediately link them with that invite. So that's really useful for, again, going, who the hell is this person?

Oh, they're they're connected to Bob's invites, so they're they're Bob's plus 1. And also, updated the invite as used by adding in the dates. We could also keep track of when people when people are responding as well. And honestly, it worked great. You know?

I know some traditionalists are like, you send paper invites to people. But these were instant. They were free. They were flexible. They were still personalized.

They allowed for consistent data entry. Didn't kill loads of trees to make it happen. It was grand, actually. It worked fantastically. We ultimately ended up with a list of who could and couldn't make it, a list of invites that we used and not used, and a mark against all the plus ones as well as dietary and access requirements worked great.

Part 1, check. We got our people. This is great. Now we are fools who DIY ed our wedding. We also completely serviced our own bars.

So let's let's take a moment to talk about what that means when you are organizing drinks for an event, for a big event. This may be knowledge to you as potentially nonevent organizers. There is a service called a wet bar, and that basically is a whole service you hire in. These people basically, it's a service that a bar will offer. They will come with a ton of drinks, staff, glassware, fridges, all the, you know, the the little the the ice buckets and the little tongs for it and all the lemons and limes.

They they charge you for all those drinks as if you were in a London bar, which is why shock horror of this is not what we did. And then they take away everything afterwards, including the things they didn't use. It's like bringing the bar to you, but you're paying full bar prices. We didn't do that. We did a dry bar, which means that we we did it all.

We rented glassware. We rented ice buckets. We rented all the the the trays and all this shit. We rented more tables for tablecloths. We rented fridges.

We bought a ton of drinks at wholesale. And then we just hired people who were bartenders and paid them a good hourly rate to come and and work for us, and we had handled the rest of it. You know, bought all the spirits and they obviously were significantly cheaper than if I was gonna buy that shot by shot from a bar. In fact, just as a just as a note, unit cost of every drink, soft or or alcoholic, just the average cost per drink I work out, if you include stuff like glassware higher, the cost of the person's time split over the number of units, I work out to be about £1.80, which is, like, wicked because you're talking, like, 5, 6, 7, 8 in a London bar otherwise. We saved a ton of money.

We did a bunch of work. We saved a bunch of money. But, like, you know, just worth noting there. So we did that. Why what is this what is this gonna do with with stupid hacky projects that maybe in hindsight I shouldn't have done?

This no. No. No. Clearly clearly, this is an example because my wedding did not have a total monthly recurring revenue. This is an insights panel inside of directors.

You will notice that on this dashboard, there are a set of panels. But you can create new, like, bespoke panels by building panel extensions. And that's what we did. Now in the interest of time, I'm just gonna show you that the outcome of this. We had a collection for drinks recipes, and then built a custom panel for that for the director's insights dashboard builder, which allowed us to set the ratios for each drink and get a shopping list for quantities based on our guest list.

So the number on the right is the unit for that given drink based on data in a different collection. For example, Coke Zeros lemonades, they come in crates of 24, but the beers come in boxes of 12. So it's not always you need this many of a thing. Well, I just got it to tell me you need to order 9 units, 9 crepes of this, 9 crepes of this and so on. Just as a as a another note, this took a bit of research.

At a wedding, you should expect a guest to have a drink every 45 minutes. There you go. That's a bit of knowledge you didn't have, which you now have. So that just helped us understand how many drinks, you know, how many drinks on average we had. This was super helpful.

Was it overengineered? Yes. Would I do it again? No. Would I use a spreadsheet next time?

Yes. But we're here. We did it. I get to talk about it. Next, the notification system.

One guest told us that our wedding was the best communicated wedding they've ever been to, and they were absolutely right. Yes. It was. You may have noticed when people RSVP'd, we or we spoke about it, we collected the lead contacts' contact information. We collected their phone number.

We collected their email address. The moment that was submitted, we ran an automation through directors flows in the Vonage number insights API to standardize the number format because no one can ever put in a number the correct way. Even if you're like, they just no one knows how to write phone numbers. Honestly, it makes me so angry. So we used a whole a whole goddamn API to standardize this.

Then we built a second flow for sending messages to our guests. It used, do I have a picture of it? No. Fine. It used this thing called the confirmation prompt dialogue.

So, you know, you go to send message, it pops up a box so you can insert some extra information and you hit go. It runs this automation. And in there, it allowed us to filter by ticket type because, you know, some you wanna send a different message to your ceremony and reception guest versus your reception guests. It allowed you to, pick whether you want this to be SMS or email. In the end, everything went both ways, but whatever, there was Vonage SMS API and the resend email API to then send out those emails to guests.

Another approach would have just been to push people to external platforms, you know, external lists as soon as they've RSVP'd. So, you know, you RSVP and this flow could just go here, get thrown into an email system list, you know, a Mailchimp list, and then just use their tools in order to send messages and not have to integrate with APIs directly. But by doing this at the source of the data, as soon as people got in touch as they often do, getting closer to the day and saying, I can't make it anymore, Or you go, I forgot to invite someone and, you know, and they well, actually, it's more important the other way where they where they opt out. You don't have to manage that second list and keep them in sync. Every time you run the flow to send a message, it's always using the dataset as it stands right now.

Super useful, actually. I was I was into this. I would I would do this again. We made a choice early on that every guest would be able to do a COVID test and just generally say they were feeling good the day our wedding. We had some vulnerable guests.

You know, we're responsible for bringing people together. It it it really mattered. So using that same Express and View application as our invite system, we added a button on each invite that the day before was shown that was like, submit your wellness certification. And then they they did that. They, you know, they filled it and said they're feeling okay on behalf of the party and they they hit go.

But what this did was it generated a security list with a little mark next to everyone's name, denoting whether they had done this wellness certification or not. Those people who did, fantastic, welcome in. Those who didn't, and there were a tiny handful who just didn't see the message or didn't do it, whatever. We had a set of COVID tests on the door, and our security guard London wedding security guard. Our security guard, you know, got them a drink and went, basically, peace out, do the test, see in 15 minutes.

Just, you know, we have this nice outside area. That's that's where you live for 15 minutes. Right? But the security list was live generated as people were filling it in. We were able to generate that, as a page, so that was super useful as well.

And there was so much more we could have done. We had every person in a database. Everyone had a unique invite link. We could have checked people in digitally, though I think it really would have felt like a tech conference then and not a wedding. So I'm glad we didn't do that.

We thought about building experiences where people would, like, validate themselves with, like, installations and, like like, play around. We just didn't have time to do that. We could have had people share their photos directly and use, like, direct us files to, like, you know, consume that and store that in a central location. But while we didn't have time to do all of that, at least I can now add wedding planning to my skill list, and, no, I won't help you with yours. So that's it, really.

That's a bit of fun. Hope you found it interesting. And next time next time? Not next time. Next time, I would hire a wedding planner.