Project for BiedMee

(December 2011 - Februari 2012)

Did a seperate project with SIT bvba for BiedMee.be which was later renamed into HolidaysBay.com (first it was http://biedmee.be, but it got rebranded into HolidaysBay.com). This was a badly written php site that had many connection and database issues. Completely rewrote the backend in Ruby On Rails. The stylesheets were copied from the old site (and a little improved but honestly it would have been better to do that from scratch also). A lot of work went into automatic payments, paypal IPN and automatic invoice creation for various suppliers of auctions. Automatic generation and emailing of vouchers in pdf format to the customers and validation of the voucher codes for the hotels and establishments was also implemented. Auction management pages were done using active admin gem. Bidding was possible like on ebay but now for holiday and vacation auctions. There was also the added feature of automatic bidding which made this quite a challenge to get it all working nicely with high server loads (people could set a target price and it would bid in small increments automatically for them up until a maximum).

The site really started to take off in februari 2012 and we got 5000 new subscribers and on some days we got even 100.000 hits in a few hours. Thereby proving the site backend was fast enough and scalable (used memcached, pagecaching for extra performance). Unfortunately the offers and margins we're not high enough to sustain enough profit for the investment and the site went down a few months later due to insufficient funding.

I have to dig up some old backups and get some screenshots of how it all worked. It also featured many admin pages done with ActiveAdmin that probably nobody but the owner and myself has seen. The site and company is now discontinued so it would be nice to share them here.

My next larger customer became PlayPass