Conference Expo handles every awkward part of running a trade show: signing sponsors, configuring their stand packages, taking payment, reviewing the artwork they submit, hopping on a thread when something needs sorting, and keeping an audit trail of who did what.
The original platform launched in 2017, and we’ve built and looked after it ever since. By 2024 it had grown beyond what the original stack could comfortably stretch to: sponsor self-service, real-time messaging, audit trails on every entity. So in 2025 we kicked off version two, a ground-up rebuild with the next decade of features in mind.
V2 started on NestJS, a Node.js framework that’s perfectly fine for some projects but wasn’t going to hold up against the breadth of features we’d planned. OAuth, audit logs, payment processing, document generation, websockets, search. Each one was going to be a wrestle. A few weeks in, we made the call to swap the backend out for Laravel. Same Nuxt frontend, same monorepo, new foundation underneath. The rewrite cost us a few weeks up front, but bought back time on every feature that followed. Real-time messaging via Laravel Reverb, OAuth2 via Passport, full audit history, chunked file uploads, PDF generation, Meilisearch: none of it has felt like a fight.
The frontend type-safety story is a small thing worth flagging. The Laravel API publishes an OpenAPI spec automatically (via Scramble), and the Nuxt frontend generates its TypeScript client from that spec (via Orval). The frontend can’t go out of sync with the backend without the build failing. No hand-written API clients, no contract drift.
V2 is live, in active development, and runs conferences with hundreds of sponsors end-to-end.
