Professional website software development & consulting.

wwcom - 2019 until today

Connecting multiple systems and creating a booking platform for wwcom. wwcom offers high quality telecommunication services in Switzerland.

Challenges

• Many existing systems and processes - solved by creating clear boundaries between systems, adding documentation and creating new APIs and connection points
• Many stakeholders - solved by a flexible system where resellers can oversee their customers while customers can also do their own changes, and wwcom has its own administration area to process requests
• Who changed what? - solved with event sourcing, which keeps track of every change and every event can be viewed by wwcom (and reversed if necessary)

SquirrelPHP + Open Source - 2019 until today

We maintain multiple open source components under the name SquirrelPHP and continue to improve them. We also support other open source projects (like Symfony, Twig or PHP itself).

Challenges

• Code quality and reliability - solved by 100% test coverage in each component we develop and heavy usage of static analyzers (Psalm and PHPStan)
• Collaboration - solved by continually having constructive discussions with other open source developers and working together in flexible ways, even when opinions and backgrounds differ in major ways

Adlershop - 2010 until 2023

The online shop of the Adler pharmacy in Winterthur (Switzerland), created by Panaxis GmbH in 2010 and continually improved until the shop was bought by Galenicare and shut down in favor of their existing Amavita online shop.

Challenges

• Fast load times - solved by creating a shop system tailored to the pharmacy use case, with open source technology and its own Javascript framework, leading to average page generation times of ~25ms (0.025s) and average page load times of ~350ms (0.35s) within Europe
• Many external systems - solved by connecting the shop to over 30 different APIs and continuing to monitor/adapt the APIs
• Large range of products - solved with automatic categorization of products according to their characteristics and using Elasticsearch for product search
• Content in four languages - solved by a translation system based on existing standards and adapting the CMS to automate connections between content and their translations

Purplemoon - 2002 until 2020

Until 2020 we built and further developed the social network Purplemoon, based on strong privacy and user-friendly terms of use.

Challenges

• Many regular users - solved by continued performance improvements and working on our infrastructure
• Conflicts between users - solved by a team of moderators with an elaborate administration and clear + concise rules
• Spam and bots - solved by automated detection and hurdles for bots without impacting actual users
• Almost no revenue - unfortunately this could never be adequately solved, but this was offset by being an idealistic project from the start, to connect like-minded people and foster friendships, which is why the project was kept alive for so long even though the financial situation was never rosy