Smooth Scaling: System Design for High Traffic

In this episode of Smooth Scaling, José Quaresma speaks with Hans Skovgaard, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Queue-it, about a shift that is already underway and accelerating fast: the internet now carries more automated bot traffic than human traffic — and agentic AI is about to make that gap much wider.
Hans explains why the old model of "bots versus humans" is fundamentally broken, and why the real question is no longer who is visiting your site, but what their intent is. The conversation covers why autoscaling can no longer protect against the extreme traffic bursts that AI agents will generate, how to make bot attacks economically unviable, and what a future of AI agents buying concert tickets on your behalf actually looks like in practice. Hans also unpacks the evolving landscape of digital identity — from payment certificates to the EU Digital Identity Wallet — and what it means to build systems that can tell a genuine buyer from a scalper running 100,000 simultaneous requests.
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(00:00) - Introduction

(01:19) - The Internet Just Changed — More Bots Than Humans Online

(03:51) - The New Threat Isn't Bots vs. Humans. It's Intent.

(06:06) - Why Autoscaling Can't Save You in the Agentic Age

(09:00) - Making Attacks Expensive — The Economics of Bot Defence

(11:02) - What Does the Future Actually Look Like? The AI Agent Buying Your Tickets

(14:30) - The Next Generation of Challenges — Easy for Humans, Costly for Bots

(18:53) - The Deeper Problem: Volatility Is Going Out of Control

(20:24) - Can We Prove You're Human? Identity, Trust & the EU Wallet

(25:45) - Rapid Fire

(30:07) - Outro

Hans J. Skovgaard is Chief Technology and Product Officer at Queue-it, the Copenhagen-founded SaaS company whose virtual waiting room technology helps the world's biggest brands manage traffic surges and prevent bot abuse during high-demand online events. With over two decades of experience leading engineering and product organisations in Nordic software companies, Hans has built a career at the intersection of deep technical expertise and strategic leadership. Before Queue-it, he served as CTPO at Penneo, a Nasdaq Copenhagen-listed RegTech company, and as CTO and VP of R&D at Capture One, where he led the company's spin-off from Phase One, launched its first SaaS product, and shipped Capture One for iPad. Earlier, he held engineering leadership roles at Milestone Systems and Microsoft. He holds an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh and an MBA from IMD, and has published research at AAAI, IEEE, and ACM.

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 
© Queue-it, 2026

In this episode of Smooth Scaling, José Quaresma sits down with Art Huggard, former VP of E-Commerce at Build-A-Bear, who transformed the company's online presence from a crashing website to a $70 million business over eight years. Art shares his unconventional path from chemical engineering to e-commerce leadership at Bass Pro Shops, Hudson's Bay, and Build-A-Bear. He reveals how the company went from website crashes every hour during the 2016 holiday season to successfully managing viral product launches like Baby Yoda that sold out in four hours. Art discusses Queue-it's virtual waiting room for handling extreme traffic spikes, real-time system tuning during flash sales, and the importance of balancing technical infrastructure with guest experience. The conversation covers cloud scalability challenges, order management bottlenecks in Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and what it takes to handle 300+ orders per minute. The episode illustrates how preparation and cross-industry lessons can turn unpredictable demand into business success.
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(00:00) - Welcome to the Smooth Scaling Podcast

(01:03) - From Chemical Engineer to Ecommerce Leader

(05:01) - How Early Ecommerce Got the Experience Wrong

(07:30) - Walking Into a Website That Was Crashing

(09:56) - Why Build-A-Bear Isn't Just a Toy Company

(12:03) - Using AI to Remove Bottlenecks and Ship Faster

(14:43) - COVID, Baby Yoda, and Sudden Demand Spikes

(16:05) - What 300 Orders a Minute Really Looks Like

(22:38) - Finding the Real Bottlenecks in the Stack

(25:29) - From Ammunition to Baby Yoda: Cross-Industry Lessons

(27:57) - Book Recommendations and Professional Advice

(30:32) - What Scalability Really Means

Art Huggard is a leading expert in Digital Commerce. He has helped many well known brands such as Build-A-Bear, Bass Pro Shops, Tracker Boats, Hudson Bay and others move from chaos to High Growth. He has a keen understanding of the entire customer ecosystem including Web, Order Management, CRM, Loyalty and Digital Marketing. Known for building high performance teams Art has been an excellent mentor to many at the companies where he has worked. Most recently Art has formed Gateway-Commerce (www.gateway-commerce.com) where he provides fractional consulting to companies looking to make significant improvements to how they serve their guests. 
This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. © Queue-it, 2026

In this episode of Smooth Scaling, José Quaresma talks with Ryan Sherlock, Director of Engineering at Intercom, about the realities of scaling databases in a fast-growing SaaS product. Ryan shares Intercom’s journey from a single MySQL database through Aurora, proxies, and per-customer scaling patterns—and what eventually pushed the team toward PlanetScale. The conversation also explores Intercom’s heartbeat-based approach to incident detection and response, focusing on customer impact rather than infrastructure metrics.
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(00:00) - Intro and episode overview

(01:14) - Early scaling pains: systems going down every day

(02:56) - Database evolution: MySQL, caching, Aurora, and ProxySQL

(07:36) - Tens of billions of rows and the table Intercom couldn’t migrate

(09:07) - Intercom’s multi-region architecture and the EU region

(10:59) - Why Intercom moved from Aurora to PlanetScale (Vitess)

(15:12) - PlanetScale in practice: shards, VTGate, and zero-downtime upgrades

(22:39) - Heartbeat metrics and automated incident response

(30:03) - AWS outage case study: DynamoDB failure and real-time recovery

(34:17) - Incident mitigation lessons: “I’m now a web box” and VTGate limits

(41:40) - Rapid fire questions: books, career advice, and scalability mindset

Ryan Sherlock is Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom in Dublin, where he leads the core technologies and infrastructure groups that power Intercom’s AI first customer service platform. Through talks and writing on the Intercom engineering blog, he shares practical playbooks on scaling infrastructure and engineering enablement, running high leverage incident response, and using heartbeat metrics to tie reliability directly to real customer outcomes rather than just server graphs. Outside Intercom, he serves on the board of the Rails Foundation, helping steward the future of the Ruby on Rails ecosystem. Before moving into tech leadership, Ryan spent several years as a professional cyclist, an experience he wrote about in “Why you should have skin in the engineering game”, and that still shapes how he thinks about risk, ownership, and reliability in software.
This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 
© Queue-it, 2026

Infrastructure is often treated as a backend concern, but in practice it shapes how users experience a product. In this episode of Smooth Scaling, Product VP Maria Petrova explores what it means when infrastructure becomes the product, looking at real-world, data-heavy systems where decisions around compute, data resolution, scheduling, regions, and cost directly impact scalability and user experience. The conversation dives into scaling beyond the MVP, balancing accuracy with performance, and why both engineers and product managers need to think carefully about infrastructure trade-offs when operating at scale.
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(00:00) - Welcome to the Smooth Scaling Podcast

(01:02) - Infrastructure Is the Product (And Why It Shapes UX)

(05:34) - Performance, Databases, and Why Compute Matters Again

(07:27) - How TWAICE Scales Battery Analytics With Sensor Data

(10:44) - What TWAICE Optimizes (And What It Doesn’t)

(14:38) - What Product Managers Must Understand About Infrastructure

(20:32) - Supermetrics: Multi-Cloud, Compliance, and Customer Expectations

(25:01) - Cutting Compute Costs at TWAICE Without Losing Accuracy

(32:05) - Principles for Building Scalable Data Products

(34:48) - Rapid Fire: Books, Advice, and What Scalability Means

Maria Petrova is a product leader known for scaling data-driven platforms and building high-performing product teams.With over a decade of experience across AdTech, eCommerce, and green tech, she’s led teams at Supermetrics, Zalando, Smartly.io, and now TWAICE, where she’s shaping AI-powered energy intelligence solutions. Maria is also the founder of Value Lab, a consultancy that embeds expert product talent into growing teams. She’s passionate about building products that truly solve customer problems at scale.
This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 
© Queue-it, 2025

In this episode, Moji Sarooghi, Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it, breaks down the design principles and distributed systems behind Queue-it’s virtual waiting room. He explains how the team handles massive traffic spikes, upholds strict first-in, first-out fairness on request, and maintains reliability at a scale that would overwhelm most platforms. Moji also covers the shift from server-side integrations to Edge compute, how Safety Net protects against unexpected peaks, and why simplicity and failure-oriented design drive every architectural choice. A clear, technical exploration of scaling responsibly when millions depend on your system.
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(00:00) - Intro

(01:34) - Visitor Flow: How the Waiting Room Works

(03:24) - Edge vs. Server-Side Connectors

(06:10) - Why Edge Improves Simplicity & Security

(07:12) - Preventing Queue Bypass Attempts

(09:14) - Connector Types & Verification Logic

(12:04) - Safety Net: Automatic Peak Protection

(14:54) - Scheduled Waiting Rooms + Safety Net

(17:19) - FIFO at Scale

(18:57) - Estimating Wait Times at Scale

(20:40) - Designing for Reliability & High Traffic

(24:38) - How Outflow Is Calculated

(29:07) - Queue-It Token & Visitor Verification

(31:02) - Cookies & Secure Access

(32:35) - Key AWS Services in the Architecture

(34:57) - Future: Multi-Cloud, Edge, & Bring Your Own Proxy

(37:59) - Outro

Mojtaba Sarooghi is a Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it. Moji was one of the company’s first employees, starting his journey as a software developer over 10 years ago. He is highly experienced with AWS services, product and architectural design, managing developer teams, and defining and executing on product vision.
This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 
© Queue-it, 2025