New CTO Shares Lessons From Leading a Live Three-Runtime Sports-Tech Platform

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The author joined RAQTS, a sports-tech platform connecting players and facilities, as CTO during an active production phase with no opportunity to pause or rebuild. Rather than designing from scratch, the priority was stabilising an already-running system that real users depended on daily. The first week was spent reading and mapping how three separate runtimes — a Unity experience, a React Native mobile app, and a Next.js web portal — interacted, rather than making any changes. Triage became essential, with focus placed on the release pipeline and live data as the elements most critical to platform reliability. The key technical principle applied was maintaining a single authoritative data source across all runtimes, ensuring no two clients could present conflicting states to users.

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