Working within the industry, to the requests of the industry
There are a number of booking platforms but feedback was that none seemed specific to what therapists wanted. We were the first (at the time) to facilitate online payments for bookings so patients can book directly with the therapists ahead of time. Our notes system and calendaring functionality was comprehensive, but specific.
We attended the National Running Show, Run-fit Expo, and BodyFit Expo as front-of-house staff so therapists could meet us and know who is behind the project.
The statistics
- > 5500 therapists
- > 430,000 appointments
- > 327,000 patient notes
- 3 national industry events attended (personally)
- 11 team members
- < 1 hour total downtime over 3.5 years
Stability
Initially the project was built as a listing website by a web agency. Part of my remit involved identifying and cleaning up legacy code and technical debt as functionality evolved.
Upgrading from Symfony 3.4 to 4.4 was not straightforward but proved the longevity of the codebase.
security
We had no breaches, even from professional pen-testers.
I build all back-end functionality assuming the user is going to try to break it, or break in. Our record is clean.
Roadmaps, building and iteration
We had our own ideas for the features but prioritised those being requested by our users. We were public with this, and customers enjoyed our response times to their queries and really stood behind us.
In return? We felt valued by the industry and enjoyed building the features people wanted.
Key takeaways
- Working on the same codebase for a number of years brings about challenges you don't anticipate from agency projects. You will notice and appreciate the code optimisations, likewise the accumilating technical debts.
- The roadmap will grow much faster than anticipated. There's no time to dedicate to making optimisations and removing tech debt unless you specifically make the time, and enforce the importance of this.
- Each person in the organisation had features they really want to see, likewise the developers have improvements they really want to focus on. We rarely agreed on what these were, but compromised on them based on the industry outlook vs what technical fixes are a must.
- The hardest dev work was in re-factoring the data structure to facilitate new functionality which we couldn't realistically foresee earlier on. I wrote migration scripts which once run on live, there's no coming back. There were no catastrophes and i'm honestly surprised by that considering the sheer stress of the task.
- Deciding on the switch from jQuery to VueJS took a lot of self-persuading. It meant some late nights building a Symfony-to-VueJS form adapter which took longer than anticipated but sped up frontend development, and made the codebase far more interesting to work with. It was a gamble that felt wrong, but proved itself worth it in every way.
Stills
