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Case study

Global Postgres Developer Virtual Conference

Five years building and running a global, fully custom virtual conference platform for the world’s PostgreSQL community — end to end, from concept to production.

Microsoft, in partnership with AMD · Platform development, live integrations & broadcast · 2021–2026
5Years running
44Talks · 50 speakers
~1,000Concurrent viewers
16Caption languages
ZeroDowntime, 2026
POSETTE 2026 identity applied across devices — the conference artwork rendered on tablets and screens.
The client

A global event for the Postgres community.

POSETTE: An Event for Postgres is a free, global, virtual conference organized by the Postgres team at Microsoft, in partnership with AMD. Now in its fifth year, it brings the worldwide PostgreSQL community together for several days of technical talks streamed to a broad developer audience — with all sessions published afterward for ongoing, on-demand viewing.

As a Microsoft-affiliated event serving a discerning, highly technical audience, POSETTE carries a specific bar: it has to feel as polished and trustworthy as any flagship corporate event, meet Microsoft’s security and accessibility standards, and speak fluently to developers who notice when the details are wrong.

MUXWilliams has served as the production and engineering partner behind POSETTE across its multi-year run — building and operating the platform, producing the broadcast, and evolving the whole experience year over year.

The challenge

Two problems at once — and a fixed date.

Producing POSETTE means solving two problems simultaneously: run a flawless live global broadcast on a fixed date, and build the custom platform that broadcast lives on — a platform that has to satisfy Microsoft’s enterprise standards while staying distinctive enough to stand apart from every other virtual Postgres event.

An off-the-shelf conference platform couldn’t deliver that. The work demanded a purpose-built site and a real production pipeline that could:

  • 01Run one polished experience across the entire conference lifecycle — from the call for proposals, through speaker and schedule reveals, to a multi-stream live day, to a permanent on-demand library.
  • 02Handle a live audience at scale — hundreds to nearly a thousand concurrent viewers — with zero tolerance for downtime on the day.
  • 03Meet Microsoft’s enterprise bar — full platform security compliance and WCAG accessibility standards, audited on an ongoing basis.
  • 04Serve a technical audience credibly — including accurate captions for dense technical terminology, code identifiers, and speaker names.
  • 05Create genuine community connection in a virtual setting, not just a one-way stream.
  • 06Improve every year — carrying forward what worked while refreshing the design and expanding capability each cycle.
The solution

A platform we own end to end. That’s what makes it bespoke.

MUXWilliams builds and operates POSETTE as a fully custom, statically-generated conference platform, hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud and engineered to Microsoft’s security and accessibility standards. Rather than renting a generic event tool, POSETTE runs on purpose-built infrastructure that MUXWilliams controls end to end — which is exactly what lets it feel bespoke, stay compliant, and evolve each year.

The platform pairs a fast, secure static site with a small set of carefully chosen dynamic services where they matter most — most notably a custom, real-time Discord integration that brings the community’s live conversation directly onto the event page. Around the platform sits a full production operation: broadcast, a maturing AI-assisted captioning pipeline, and full-lifecycle analytics that track the event’s reach from the first call for proposals through years of on-demand viewership.

Over five years, the platform has matured from an early self-hosted setup into a Microsoft-compliant, Azure-based system — growing more capable, more automated, and more resilient each cycle, culminating in a zero-downtime 2026.

Concept to production

Six phases. Roughly eight months. One site that keeps transforming.

Every POSETTE cycle moves through six distinct phases. Each phase is its own front-end construct and its own build — not a static brochure, but a living site that changes as the conference progresses from an open call to a live global broadcast to a permanent archive.

01

Call for Proposals opensMid-November

The year launches with a complete visual redesign over the platform’s proven structure — homepage, about, CFP, FAQ, and code-of-conduct pages go live.

Under the hood
Each year begins with a full “reskin” — a new design applied across the site while carrying forward the battle-tested page architecture. The engineering challenge is making each new design fully functional and responsive across devices without rebuilding the foundation. These pages then update incrementally at every milestone that follows.
02

Call for Proposals closesEarly February

The site shifts to reflect that submissions are closed.

Under the hood
A lightweight content and announcement update — a deliberate low-complexity checkpoint in the cycle.
03

Speaker list announcedMid-February

A dynamic speaker grid goes live, generated from the accepted-speaker data.

Under the hood
Speaker data flows from the submission system into the site’s build process, generating the speaker grid automatically. A custom-built helper converts rich speaker bios into properly formatted web content — one of several reusable tools MUXWilliams built for the platform and relies on every year.
04

Schedule dropsEnd of February

The full schedule publishes, along with individual speaker pages and dedicated pages for every talk.

Under the hood
This is the most structurally demanding build of the pre-event phases. Flat session data is transformed into a true time-slotted schedule spanning four separate livestreams, with each talk correctly mapped to its stream and time. MUXWilliams engineered a mapping system to drive this schedule logic — and evolved the design from inline expandable panels (earlier years) to a fully interlinked web of dedicated talk and speaker pages (2025 onward), improving both usability and SEO.
05

Live conferenceThe main event

The live day itself — four livestreams and three intermissions — with the video player and the live community feed front and center.

Under the hood
The event page runs four livestream segments interleaved with intermissions, each transition staged precisely as the day unfolds. The signature element is the custom real-time Discord integration — a live, fully branded view of the community’s conversation embedded directly on the page. This is the one genuinely live, dynamic system in the platform, and it’s engineered to scale with the audience through the entire broadcast.
A POSETTE 2026 livestream — a speaker beside their slide on visual query execution plans, inside the branded broadcast frame.
Live broadcast — branded speaker solo layout
06

Post-conferenceThe long tail

Every talk is published to a permanent, on-demand library across the schedule and individual talk pages.

Under the hood
Captioned talk videos are published and woven back into the same schedule and talk-page structure, turning the live event into a lasting resource. Because captions are completed upstream before publication, every video is fully accessible from the moment it goes live — and its viewership is tracked from that point on, indefinitely.
Under the hood

Engineering highlights.

Custom real-time Discord integration

A from-scratch, live community feed that renders the conference’s Discord conversation directly on the event page — no app-switching, no leaving the site.

Deeper
Built as a custom service using the Discord API, this integration continuously pulls live messages, reactions, and shared media and renders them in a fully custom interface styled to feel native. Every content type — messages, links, animations, video — is individually handled and custom-designed. Critically, it’s read-only by design (it only ever reads from Discord, never writes back), a deliberate choice that keeps the security surface minimal. It’s engineered to scale with a live audience of hundreds to ~1,000 concurrent viewers, and after five years it’s the piece the team is proudest of: stable, low-maintenance, and reused each year.

Privacy-first video delivery

Talk videos load only when a viewer chooses to play them — a small, deliberate engineering decision that satisfies strict privacy and consent standards.

Deeper
Instead of auto-loading embedded video (and its tracking) on page load, the platform shows a lightweight placeholder and swaps in the real player only on an explicit click. This was built specifically to meet Microsoft’s privacy and cookie-consent requirements around embedded content — an example of engineering decisions driven by enterprise compliance, not just convenience.

AI-assisted captioning pipeline

A human-supervised, AI-accelerated captioning workflow delivering accurate captions in 16 languages for a highly technical audience.

Deeper
The captioning pipeline has matured across three generations of tooling, steadily raising accuracy while reducing manual effort. Today, AI handles the first-pass transcription and timing; two human passes — an edit and a separate review — ensure technical terms, code identifiers, and speaker names are right. English captions are then published and auto-translated into 15 additional languages. A notable finding from the work: modern AI transcription often outperformed human reviewers at parsing diverse speaker accents, while humans remained essential for verifying dense technical concepts. Captions are always finished before videos publish, so accessibility is built in from day one.

Full-lifecycle analytics

The event’s reach is measured continuously — from the first proposal submitted to video views years later — with tracking that never stops.

Deeper
MUXWilliams tracks meaningful signal at every stage of the lifecycle: proposals, registrations, newsletter signups, calendar adds, site behavior, live viewership, and long-tail on-demand views. Reporting is consolidated where possible for year-over-year analysis of the metrics that actually indicate momentum — pageviews, registrations, calendar adds, and, above all, talk-level video views. The long tail is a first-class concern: post-conference viewership is tracked from publication onward with no cutoff, and has never stopped for any past year’s talks.

Tech stack

  • Azure
  • Node
  • Discord API
  • Static-site generator
  • HappyScribe
  • Looker Studio
  • Sessionize
  • Streamyard

Back-end implementation architecture

Scroll the diagram sideways →
Back-end implementation architecture Speaker data moves from Sessionize JSON into one YAML source, then through a static build to the speaker grid. Markdown bios inside YAML are converted to HTML by a custom Ruby helper. SYSTEM FLOW Back-end implementation Speaker content is normalized once, transformed at build time, and published as a generated grid. 01 — SOURCE Sessionize JSON API Speaker data 02 — NORMALIZE Speakers YAML ONE FILE All speakers 03 — COMPILE Static build BUILD TIME Compile + render 04 — PUBLISH Speaker grid GENERATED UI Published pages BIO TRANSFORMATION Markdown bios Stored inside YAML PASS Custom Ruby helper Converts Markdown CONVERT HTML bios Ready for the grid BUILD-TIME CONTENT PIPELINE
The pipeline behind Phase 3 — speaker data, normalized once and generated at build time.
Built to enterprise standard

An enterprise bar, held continuously — not signed off once.

Running under the Microsoft umbrella means POSETTE is held to an enterprise bar, continuously. MUXWilliams engineered and maintains the platform to meet Microsoft’s security requirements and WCAG accessibility standards — covering areas like alt text, color contrast, and keyboard navigation — with ongoing audits rather than a one-time sign-off.

A defining part of the platform’s maturation was a full migration onto Microsoft’s cloud to meet that compliance bar — consolidating hosting, domain, and security onto Azure. Attendee personal data is deliberately kept off POSETTE’s own infrastructure and handled by dedicated first-party platforms, minimizing the data the site itself ever touches. Because Microsoft’s compliance requirements evolve continually, meeting them is an ongoing discipline — one MUXWilliams manages as a standing part of the engagement.

Five years of evolution

Each year’s hardest problems became the next year’s foundation.

POSETTE didn’t arrive fully formed — it was engineered into what it is over five years of iteration, with MUXWilliams building and refining the platform every cycle.

  1. Early years

    A working custom site on an early self-hosted setup, with captioning handled through a manual, editing-heavy workflow.

  2. The platform migration

    A full move onto Microsoft’s Azure cloud and domain infrastructure to meet Microsoft’s compliance and security bar — the foundation the current platform stands on.

  3. Growing capability

    The live Discord integration was introduced and hardened; the site grew from inline schedule panels into a fully interlinked structure of dedicated speaker and talk pages; the captioning pipeline advanced across three generations of tooling.

  4. Today

    A mature, resilient platform that reuses hard-won custom infrastructure year over year — and delivered a zero-downtime 2026, a direct improvement over the scaling challenges of earlier years.

Speaker webcam tiles and production screens from the POSETTE 2026 broadcast, arranged across a dark field.
2026 broadcast — community images from the production
Impact

What five years of compounding engineering bought.

  • A distinctive, credible home for a global community. A fully custom platform — rather than a generic conference tool — gives POSETTE a level of polish and personality that sets it apart from other Postgres events.
  • Scale, handled. The platform has supported nearly 1,000 concurrent live viewers, with the live community feed engineered to scale alongside them.
  • Zero downtime in 2026. The most recent event ran without reported downtime — the payoff of five years of hardening.
  • A permanent, growing resource. Every talk lives on in an accessible, captioned, on-demand library whose viewership keeps compounding year after year.
  • Reusable engineering. The custom Discord service, the content-generation helpers, and the schedule system are all reused each cycle — compounding value rather than rebuilding from scratch.

MUXWilliams has been an essential partner in bringing POSETTE to life year after year. They handle everything from the platform to the livestream presentation with a level of care and technical skill that lets our team focus on the content, not the production.

Teresa Giacomini · Former PMM · Postgres team at Microsoft

Let’s build your event.

If you’re planning a virtual conference, a developer event, or a technical program that needs both a polished broadcast and the engineering to back it — MUXWilliams builds the whole thing, end to end.

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