Application Screenshot
Event Ticket Marketplace • System Design Project
An event ticket marketplace built to explore practical system design concepts through real-world application development.
TurnupCity was built primarily to explore software architecture and system design through the implementation of a realistic event ticket marketplace. Rather than treating it as another CRUD application, I approached the project as an opportunity to understand how multiple interacting components — authentication, event management, ticket purchasing, and user profiles — come together to form a cohesive software system.
The project simulates real-world business workflows involving event organizers who publish events, attendees who discover and purchase tickets, and administrative functionality that ties everything together. The objective was to gain practical experience designing applications that model genuine business processes, not just data tables.
Helping users browse and find events that match their interests in a structured way.
Giving event creators a straightforward way to list and manage their events.
Managing ticket inventory and preventing overselling through proper data handling.
Securely identifying users and maintaining appropriate access across different roles.
Structuring event data — dates, locations, descriptions — in a way that's both queryable and presentable.
Creating a logical sequence from event discovery through to ticket confirmation.
Django's built-in auth system handles registration, login, and session management for both attendees and organizers.
Organizers can create, edit, and manage events with details including date, location, description, and ticket availability.
A browsable event listing with basic categorization helps users find events they're interested in attending.
A straightforward workflow guides attendees from viewing an event to confirming their ticket selection.
Users can view their purchased tickets and organizers can track their published events.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript deliver a clean, accessible interface that works across devices.
Identified the event ticket marketplace as a domain rich enough to explore meaningful system design concepts.
Mapped out user roles, core workflows, and the relationships between events, tickets, and users.
Designed the entity relationship model — organizers, events, tickets, purchases, and user profiles.
Built the Django application with models, views, templates, and business logic for the core workflows.
Validated authentication flows, ticket purchasing logic, and edge cases in the application workflow.
Achieved a working prototype that demonstrates the full event marketplace workflow end to end.
Documented architectural insights, design patterns, and lessons learned for future projects.
Building TurnupCity significantly deepened my understanding of how software systems are structured. Beyond writing code, I focused on how components interact, how data flows through an application, and how design decisions made early in a project affect everything that follows.
Understanding how Django's MVT pattern separates concerns — models for data, views for logic, templates for presentation — and why this separation matters for maintainability.
Modeling real-world processes — event creation, ticket purchasing — as sequences of application states and user actions.
Designing how users, events, tickets, and purchases relate to each other — and how those relationships shape both the database and the user experience.
Implementing secure user identity while keeping the login and registration experience straightforward for end users.
Keeping business logic out of templates, data access out of views, and presentation logic where it belongs — principles that scale with application complexity.
Designing software around how real users interact with it — organizers need different views than attendees, and the system reflects that.
The Django project was organized into focused apps — events, users, tickets — each handling a specific domain. This modular structure makes the codebase easier to navigate and allows individual components to evolve independently.
Database models were designed with relationships in mind — an event belongs to an organizer, a ticket belongs to an event, a purchase connects a user to a ticket. These relationships form the backbone of the application's data integrity.
Business logic was kept in Django views and model methods rather than scattered across templates. This centralization makes the application's behavior predictable and easier to debug.
Validation was implemented at multiple levels — HTML form validation for immediate feedback, Django form validation for business rules, and model constraints for database-level integrity.
Variables, function names, and template structures were chosen to be self-documenting. The goal was that someone exploring the repository could understand the application's structure without extensive documentation.
Even though this was a learning project, the architecture was designed with expansion in mind — payment integration, notification systems, and mobile APIs could be added without restructuring the core application.
The GitHub repository is the best way to understand this project. Below are the key areas you'll find when exploring the codebase.
Django apps organized by domain — events, users, tickets — with clear separation between models, views, and templates.
MVT pattern implementation showing how data flows from database through views to the user interface.
Consistent naming conventions, modular imports, and logical grouping of related functionality.
Entity definitions with foreign key relationships, field constraints, and model methods that encapsulate business logic.
User registration, login, logout, and session management using Django's built-in authentication system.
Ticket purchasing workflows, event management operations, and data validation rules implemented in views and models.
Django was the natural choice for this project because its built-in features — authentication, ORM, admin interface, and template engine — allowed me to focus on system design rather than reinventing foundational components. The framework's "batteries-included" philosophy meant I could build a complete, working application without stitching together multiple libraries.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript provided full control over the frontend without introducing the complexity of a separate framework. Keeping the stack simple kept the focus on the backend architecture and business logic — which was the primary learning goal.
The biggest challenge was designing workflows that felt natural — from event discovery to ticket confirmation — while keeping the underlying code clean. Each step in the user journey needed to map to a clear application state.
Even for a prototype, I considered how the application might grow — how the database would handle more events, how the ticket purchasing flow would scale, and where bottlenecks might emerge.
Getting the entity relationships right — users, events, tickets, purchases — required thinking through how each entity connects to the others and what constraints those connections impose.
It's tempting to add features endlessly. I learned to identify the core workflows that demonstrate the system's design without unnecessary complexity.
Connect to payment processors for real transaction handling.
Generate scannable tickets for event entry verification.
Automated purchase receipts and event reminders.
Deploy the application to a production cloud environment.
In-app and email notifications for event updates and reminders.
React Native client consuming the existing backend architecture.
Optional — one representative screenshot
Application component relationships
Entity relationship diagram
TurnupCity represents an important milestone in my software engineering journey because it challenged me to think beyond individual features and instead focus on how complete software systems are designed. Building an event ticket marketplace — even as a prototype — required understanding how authentication, data modeling, business logic, and user interfaces come together as a cohesive whole.
The project strengthened my understanding of software architecture, application workflows, backend development, and system design. More importantly, it reinforced that great software comes from thoughtful planning, clean organization, and a genuine curiosity about how systems work.
Projects like TurnupCity have helped shape the way I approach solving complex engineering problems today — with careful consideration of architecture, maintainability, and the real-world impact of every technical decision.