Client & context
A hosting marketplace platform connected property owners and guests, with a mix of:
- A custom in-house content management framework.
- Laravel 8 and Nuxt 2 applications.
- Infrastructure running on AWS with Traefik and multiple services.
The system had grown organically and was fragile in production and complicated to work with in development.
Challenges
- Local development setups were inconsistent and fragile, sometimes requiring days to get a new environment running.
- After production server restarts, applications sometimes failed to start correctly.
- Backups and deployments were partially manual and not well documented.
- Infrastructure knowledge (e.g., Traefik configuration) was undocumented and only on the server.
- The codebase contained misplaced configuration, outdated libraries, and security concerns.
What I did
1. Fixed and documented local development
- Debugged, optimized, and enhanced procedures and configurations for:
- Development with and without Docker.
- Application startup and environment variables.
- Improved and extended development documentation, making onboarding smoother.
2. Stabilized production behavior
- Identified and fixed problems that prevented applications from starting correctly after server restarts.
- Configured automatic AWS backups for critical databases.
- Discovered an undocumented Traefik configuration on the production server, moved it into version control, and cleaned it up.
3. Improved deployments and staging
- Created a staging environment to safely test changes before production.
- Implemented an anonymization script for staging data to protect user privacy.
- Set up Bitbucket CI/CD pipelines to streamline deployment and reduce manual work.
4. Fixed application-level issues
- Investigated and learned how the custom CMS framework worked, then:
- Fixed bugs and completed feature tasks (e.g., “sign in as user” for admins, integration improvements).
- Fixed bugs and completed tasks across Laravel 8 and Nuxt 2 applications, including:
- Moving hard-coded configuration constants to
.env files.
- Replacing an outdated Google sign-in library with a supported SDK.
Results
- The team gained a reliable, documented development environment, reducing onboarding and daily friction.
- Production restarts and deployments became more predictable and safer.
- The platform gained a proper staging environment with anonymized data.
- Security and maintainability improved due to better configuration management and library updates.
Tech & responsibilities
- Role: PHP/Vue full-stack developer with DevOps responsibilities
- Technologies: Laravel 8, Nuxt 2, custom PHP framework, Docker, Traefik, AWS (RDS, backups), Bitbucket CI/CD, OAuth/Google sign-in
- Scope: Infrastructure stabilization, dev environment, CI/CD, bug fixing, and feature implementation
If your hosting or marketplace platform is fragile in production and hard to work with, I can help you stabilize infrastructure, introduce proper staging, and untangle legacy configuration.
Back to all case studies
