Earlier role SaaS · Modernisation
SmartLab Services
A collaboration platform used by companies internationally, rebuilt from an older PHP codebase onto Laravel, with a web front end and a mobile app.
What it is
SmartLab Services is a suite of SaaS tools for collaboration and facilitated working, used by companies internationally. This was employment at Ludic Group, over roughly seven years, first as a senior developer and then as lead developer. It is not a Digital Smiddy client project.
Most of the detail of individual customer engagements from that period stays unpublished. What follows is the platform work that can be described.
The business problem
The product had grown as a monolithic CodeIgniter application. It needed to keep serving existing customers while the codebase became something the team could change with more confidence, and while a mobile client was added alongside the web product.
The work
The rebuild from CodeIgniter 3 onto Laravel was led hands-on, with React used for the web front end. A mobile app was supervised rather than written alone, using Angular and Ionic.
Around the code, the development team moved onto Scrum, with sprint planning and reviews, code review, and a branching approach the team could share. Deployment was tightened with scripts and small DevOps tools, in Python and Bash, so updating a SmartLab instance was a repeatable job rather than a manual one.
Why it is here
Businesses often arrive with software that works and has become difficult to move. SmartLab is the longest example of that: a product kept in service while its foundations were replaced, with a team around the work rather than a solo rewrite in a vacuum.
Technologies