From a WordPress newsroom to a Rails platform.
ShermansTravel built a devoted audience among travellers hunting the best deals on flights, hotels, packages and cruises. By the early 2010s the original WordPress / PHP stack was creaking under the load of daily eblasts to millions of subscribers.
Runtime managed the migration to Ruby on Rails — content, subscribers, deal pipelines, the lot — and then stayed for the scaling work. The flagship weekly deals email had to land on time, every Tuesday morning, without putting the front-end into queue-of-death territory.
Infrastructure had to support thousands of simultaneous users across multiple homegrown and third-party applications, with traffic spiking around the email sends and travel-deal news cycles.
The post-click redirect — engineering's least glamorous load-bearing wall.
Travel media revenue depends on a small unsexy detail: the post-click intermediary page. When a subscriber clicks a deal, the redirect has to capture user information and traffic source instantly, then bounce them to the partner site — without losing the click to a slow page load.
Runtime built the proprietary platform managing all travel deals, reporting and analytics; designed an optimised intermediary page that registers clicks and analytics in milliseconds; and continuously tuned the redirect path for sub-2-second load-and-redirect under thousands of simultaneous requests.
On top of the redirect path: ad retargeting capability and a recommendation engine that tunes deal placement based on what subscribers actually opened.
A stack tuned for millisecond post-click redirects.
ShermansTravel runs at the rare junction of newsroom and ad-tech. Editors push deals, subscribers click them, and a sub-2-second redirect path has to fire millions of times a day. Every layer of the stack was chosen for that constraint.
14 years of compound scaling.
The platform has scaled to support millions of readers, with millisecond performance on the critical revenue path. Every redesign, every CMS change, every infrastructure migration has happened in flight — without taking the newsletter offline.
This is what compound product engineering looks like: same partner, same system, fourteen years.
Still running — and still being shipped.
ShermansTravel is our longest-running engagement. The platform we built in 2011 has been continuously shipped against ever since — new deal categories, new partner integrations, new monetisation surfaces. Strategic partner, not vendor.
