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Want to know more?

Story time!

At the time, Emmanuel had just graduated from Le Wagon Marseille, learning ruby on rails.

He went in hoping to acquire the skills required to revamp from scratch his legacy PHP app, but using a stack he could own himself, instead of depending on either a tech cofounder, or 3rd parties like freelancers or agencies, with whom he had terrible experiences quite recently.

Problem was, his app and the business workflows it had been supporting for the past 10 years were quite complex!

We started working in February 2022, running with a team of three people at first, through weekly sessions of brainstorm and conception at first, then quickly moving on to programming.

I quickly asked Jean-Julien to join us on the project, as we started moving from revamping the core data model and basic features to customer facing features, thus needing a stronger design and frontend direction.

We took what I feel was the smartest approach at the time: we left the existing PHP app running on the main domain, but started deploying really early the new version on an alternate domain, driving some real customers through the secondary app, in order to validate step by step that the new app we were building would be able to replace the old one at some not-so-distant point in the future.

We also kept the work as lean as possible in terms of time spent, as Emmanuel had to keep running the business while also working with us on the revamp.