Venuehub

Project Overview

Venuehub brought me onto an existing project as extra frontend support, working on a dashboard built in Laravel and Vue (Laravel handles the backend, Vue the frontend). There were already two developers in place, one on each side, and the plan was for me to work on-site alongside them.

Then COVID hit partway through and on-site stopped being possible. Venuehub moved everyone onto remote desktop, where you log into a machine back at the office and drive it from home. It was slow and not much fun to work in, but it did the job and the work carried on.

I was hired for the frontend, but the more useful thing I brought was probably that I could read both sides of the codebase. The two developers were each focused on their own half, which is normal and sensible. Because I understood the backend as well as the frontend, I could sit between them and keep the integration decisions (where the frontend and backend have to agree on how they talk to each other) moving, instead of one side waiting on the other.

I work remotely and hourly, and given proper access to a codebase I don't need to be in the room to be useful. That held up here. The working relationship stayed good the whole way through, with Venuehub and with the two developers I was alongside, and I'd put as much weight on the developers being happy to work with me as on the client being happy.

The engagement ran nine months. It stalled in the end, but not over anything in the code or the team. COVID had gutted hospitality budgets across the board and Venuehub's market had gone into freefall, and there wasn't much anyone could do about that.

After it wrapped, Venuehub came back and asked me to return, and brought a second piece of work off the back of it. I turned the return down because it needed to be on-site and I work remotely, and the second project didn't go ahead because their own client pulled out. Neither came off. But Venuehub came back and asked, which is the thing I'd take from it.

So what Venuehub got was nine months of frontend work delivered remotely through a pandemic, with the quality holding the whole way.