Venuehub

Project Overview

Venuehub brought me in as extra frontend support on their internal system, a Laravel and Vue application their staff used to run the business day to day (Laravel handles the backend, Vue the interface people click on). Two developers were already on it, one on each side, and I came in alongside them. My first weeks went on the smaller pieces around the edges: table pagination, clickable rows, the enquiries tab, audit log views.

The booking section was the main piece of work. It began in January with a meeting about how a booking should actually work, and I built out from there: the form structure, the general information tab with its saving and data handling, the conference room and guest tabs, adding and removing guests, room items and equipment, and a response-due date that updates itself as the booking changes.

Around that sat commission rates, including tactical rates, which are the reduced rates a venue offers for a specific date range when it needs to fill the diary. Those needed validating on both the date range and the minimum number of delegates. Then an employee module with a create flow, inactive handling and a searchable audit log, a file bank front end, working hours hooked up to the API, and a pass over form validation across the whole site, giving every field a proper name so error messages read like English instead of repeating the database column. It's a small thing, and users hit it constantly.

I was hired for the frontend, but I could read the backend too, so I picked up the database migrations (the scripted changes that add or alter tables), the model association methods (the code that tells Laravel how records relate, so a booking knows which guests belong to it) and the API field changes myself, where that saved writing them up and handing them across. On a team of three, it usually did.

I worked mostly remotely, with occasional days on-site, and billed twenty-five days of work between October 2019 and March 2020. Venuehub also lined up a second project with me, running from that February through to May, though I never wrote any code on it.

What Venuehub got was a working booking section where there hadn't been one, commission and employee handling to go with it, and validation across the system that told their staff what was actually wrong.