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DogSport USA
An online community, breed registry, and live-events platform for dog sport enthusiasts — pedigree registry, sport clubs, live event broadcasts, and a handler/breeder network, built, hosted, and operated end to end.
> The brief
Dog sports are a passionate but niche world, scattered across generic forums, social media groups, and spreadsheets. DogSport USA set out to give the community a real home: a searchable breed registry with pedigrees, sport clubs to organize around, live broadcasts of events, and a way for handlers and breeders to find each other — all in one platform, owned outright rather than rented from a SaaS.
> What was built
- Registry Searchable dog registry with pedigrees, rosters, and handler links
- Clubs Sport clubs for members to join and organize around
- Live events Multi-day live broadcasts with replays and on-demand clips
- Community Handler and breeder profiles and networking
- Payments Square checkout — validated for cross-border buyers
- Two countries Serving both the US and Canada
- Delivery Installable progressive web app (PWA)
- Operations Built and run by one engineer — app, streaming, hosting, and network
> By the numbers
Live figures from the platform database. The registry alone spans 50,000+ dogs with pedigrees, titles, event results, and health records.
> Under the hood
Here's the part most web developers can't do: DogSport USA runs a full live-video pipeline on AWS Elemental — MediaLive for ingest and transcoding, MediaPackage for packaging, and MediaConvert to turn finished broadcasts into on-demand replays and clips — delivered through CloudFront with signed URLs so paid content stays paid. Building the website is table stakes; building the streaming stack behind it is the hard part.
- Backend Node.js / Express API on PostgreSQL and Redis
- Realtime WebSockets for live updates during events
- Streaming AWS MediaLive + MediaPackage + MediaConvert
- Delivery CloudFront with signed URLs; S3 for media and VOD
- Payments Square
- Email Amazon SES for transactional and subscriber mail
- Security JWT auth, bcrypt, rate limiting, hardened headers
> Why it matters
DogSport USA is proof of the whole RedCyfer thesis in one project: the web platform, the servers behind it, the network they live on, and the payment and email systems around them all came from the same person. When something needs changing, there's no vendor finger-pointing and no waiting on a support queue — just the engineer who built it.
DogSport USA is an independent venture of RedCyfer's owner; it doubles as the reference platform behind RedCyfer Media.