I don’t often talk about the specifics of work I’ve done publicly, but recently I collaborated with Craig Castledine on the relaunch of the website for the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race.
I’ve been working with the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia on this and other websites since 2003. Twenty three years! Which I think is some kind of record in this industry.
Massive Interactive was one of Sydney’s premier web and digital agencies in the early 2000s and won the contract to build the site in 2002. I joined in early 2003 to enhance it, add some additional features, and scale it to get through the load of the Boxing Day event. At the time it was the biggest sporting website in the Southern Hemisphere, the traffic hitting the site was fairly overwhelming.
I left Massive in 2006 and inherited the site as a freelance operator not long after. It’s hard to find somebody who is prepared to work Christmas and juggle site load, GPS data processing, weather forecast data processing, audio streaming, video streaming, and all the other moving parts involved in operating a site of this scale.
Along the way the architecture powering the site has evolved a lot, and this is the second major redesign. Last year I worked with Craig Castledine on a major redesign and rebuild which has totally modernised the site’s look and feel for the 2025 race and vastly improved the experience for mobile users.
It’s also a move away from the .NET stack for the web tier, using Astro and Node.Js to serve the pages, as well as a combination of Vue and Alpine.js for front end interactivity. It’s always a risk using a new stack under load, but we got through the busy period with some lessons learned and some ideas for the future.
For anybody interested in some of the details, next week I’ll be doing an online talk and Q&A about the evolution of the site with Sydney’s ALT.NET meetup on Tuesday the 27th of January.
