Listen "235: When Romance Becomes a Database Problem with Sean Corfield"
Episode Synopsis
How do you keep millions of people safe on 40 different dating sites while simultaneously figuring out what drives them to buy memberships? Sean Corfield joins Adam and Ben to discuss the surprisingly complex engineering and business challenges of observing user behavior at massive scale.Sean runs us through fraud detection and prevention (including devastating "pig butchering" romance scams), database architecture at enormous scale (700GB databases with 250M+ row tables), custom domain-specific languages for writing business rules without touching SQL, real-time scoring systems with hundreds of rules, zero-downtime deployments and schema migrations, and the constant cat-and-mouse game between scammers and detection systems.Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.Full show notes and transcript here.
More episodes of the podcast Working Code
244: Ben vs 2026
08/01/2026
243: Oops, All Aftershow
18/12/2025
241: Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords
06/12/2025
240: Memento Mori with Shawn Oden
27/11/2025
239: Welcome to the Feature Factory
20/11/2025
238: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
13/11/2025
236: Trunk or Treat
03/11/2025
234: The Multitasking Mind
18/10/2025
ZARZA We are Zarza, the prestigious firm behind major projects in information technology.