Saff
Queue management for events and service desks: digital tickets, a calling display and live tracking, in French, Arabic and English.
The problem
A physical queue is invisible to the organiser and frustrating for the public: nobody knows how long the wait will be, and the team has no data on where the bottleneck is.
The outcome
A digital ticket taken on a phone, a calling display per desk, and live tracking for the organiser — with nothing to install.
The context
At the desks of an event, a public office or a trade show, waiting is still handled by guess: you join the queue, you have no idea how long it will take, and the organiser only learns afterwards which position was overwhelmed.
Existing queue systems are designed for permanent installations: physical kiosks, proprietary screens, an annual contract. None of that makes sense for an event lasting three days, or for an organisation that wants to try before investing.
The constraints
- Nothing to install. The public takes a ticket on their own phone.
- Three languages, including Arabic right to left across the whole interface.
- Several desks in parallel calling from the same queue, never serving the same ticket twice.
- A network that is not reliable: on an event site, the connection drops.
The technical decisions
Concurrent calling. This is the heart of the product. Two agents pressing “next” in the same second must never get the same ticket. The problem is not solved in application code — it is solved by the database, the only place where the order of operations is guaranteed. Assigning a ticket is an atomic operation, locked for the duration of the transaction, and never a read followed by a write.
SQL written by hand, no ORM. On a product whose value sits in a handful of precise concurrent queries, an abstraction layer hides exactly what needs to be visible: which lock is taken, for how long, and in what order.
Multilingual from the first line. The interfaces are built on logical rather than directional properties, so switching to Arabic is an attribute change rather than a rewrite. Converting afterwards costs several days; planning for it costs minutes.
Multi-level access — organiser, desk agent, product administration — with strict isolation between organisations.
Where it stands
The back end and front end are substantially built, and the admin panel and access control are in place. The product is in beta: it works, it has not yet been used under real conditions. This page will be completed with the figures from the first event served — tickets handled, simultaneous desks, duration — because a number from the field beats everything above it.