Examples of requests our business received from customers, the steps we took to find the solution that suited their goals and the results they achieved.
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Checkfront is an online booking system for Tours, Activities, Rentals etc.
Salesforce is a customer relationship management solution that gives a single shared view of every customer.
This project was outsourced to me by local independent consultancy Salt Hub because of my depth of experience with web technologies. The end client wanted every customer making a booking with Checkfront to be added to Salesforce so there was an easy way to stay in contact with them. They also wanted to ask the customer a few questions when they used Checkfront and have access to the responses in Salesforce.
There wasn't anything off the shelf that could do this so a custom solution was necessary.
We built a system using PHP and the CodeIgniter 4 framework. When a booking takes place Checkfront passes the information via a webhook and it gets added to a simple queue. Using a queue is a great architectural decision when working with different APIs because if there are internet delays, maintenance or technical issues when trying to process a job in the queue, you can just reschedule it and try again another time.
When a booking is made in Checkfront the Guest details can be completed at a later date so once the details of the person making the booking have been captured a new job is added to the queue for a future date to check if the Guest details have been completed.
This project was outsourced to us by a local web agency. They were very competent at creating good looking WordPress sites but their client wanted some custom extras and they wanted to avoid a host of extra plugins that would only give them a limited version of what their client was looking for and restrict the appearance.
We use custom PHP to retrieve the latest customer reviews from Google and Facebook via their APIs and made a configurable review block that could be dragged and dropped into the WordPress block editor to display the reviews.
The second requirement was to integrate WooCommerce with their Google Calendar so that courses purchased via the website were automatically booked into the calendar with extra information about the customers. This was done by writing code that ran inside the Zapier web application integration service to receive data from WooCommerce, process it and add to the calendar.
The final requirement was to remind customers when their courses were due. We integrated with the Twilio API to send SMS messages and SendGrid to send emails close to the course dates.
A global leader in industrial pump manufacturing required a web based system to allow customers to remotely watch the testing certification process for the pumps they had purchased. These aren't the sort of pumps you would use to empty a garden pond, they are highly sophisticated engineered-to-order solutions for the oil and gas industry costing tens of thousands of pounds.
This highly complicated project required secure streaming of multiple video feeds from within the clients firewalled network, streaming of live telemetry from the pumps themselves and a live messaging system so customers could communicate with pump engineers.
I'm sure you will understand that we can't go into too much detail but a combination of technologies including PHP & CodeIgniter, JavaScript & Node.js, Nginx, FFmpeg, RTSP, ASP.NET, SignalR, Puppeteer are all used.
This was truly a unique project and the client can demonstrate to their customers that they are at the cutting edge of technology in their field.