Cuibul Artistilor – Real-time booking platform (TC, 2016-2020, 2022-)
Info
- Period 2016 - 2020 & 2022 - present
- Project type Real-time booking platform
- My Role Developer, Solution Architect
- Technologies Linux, MySQL, REST, Js, Vue, Shell, Docker, Metabase
- Architecture Client-server, Event-bus, Model-view-controller patterns, Microservices
- Keywords Push Notifications, Concurrency, Real-time resource management
- Modules Booking web & mobile apps, Admin Dashboard, Checkin system, Mailing system, Push notifications, SMS gateway, Statistics & Analytics.
- Number of users > 45k (Oct 2022)
- Number of bookings >135k (Oct 2022)
Description
Cuibul Artistilor (aka CA) is a Romanian Performance Art Theatre and a love mark. They are organizing daily events for approximately 240 attendees per day.
I started working with Cuibul Artistilor initially in 2016 when they came to our university for one of their first shows when I noticed that although they were very talented and had a strong brand, they lacked the technical component. They did not have online tools to communicate with the audience, so I offered to help them build a dedicated booking platform.
Between Oct 2016 to Mar 2020, I & my team (TC) worked with them as volunteers to develop and maintain the web booking application. Later on, by the end of 2019, we started a commercial collaboration, to create and launch the mobile apps. In 2022 we restarted the collaboration.
The platform is a microservices-based app, built incrementally over more than 2 years, and contains the following modules:
- Booking interface - public web app & mobile (Android & iOS) applications
- Admin Dashboard - web app used by the staff to declare & configure events and occurrences
- Checkin system - web app used by the performance hall staff to check in attendees
- Mailing system - email notification system & newsletter, used to communicate with the user base
- Push notifications - used to send notifications to mobile apps users (Android & iOS)
- SMS gateway - platform to send notifications to the users over SMS
- Statistics and Analytics - dashboard for staff, to understand user behaviour
Technologies we were working with:
- Linux CentOS - virtual machine to host the server components
- MySQL DB - relational database used for the persistency layer
- REST API - written in Js,
- Web interfaces (desktop & mobile responsive) written in Js (with React and Vue)
- 2 mobile apps (wrappers of the mobile version, for Android and iOS).
My responsibilities included:
- coordination of a team of 2 developers and 1 graphic designed
- implementing the application backend (shell script & MySQL stored procedures)
- being the architect of the solution
- communication with the Cuibul Artistilor team and translation between technical and non-technical members of both teams (TC and CA)
Team
Initially, I started working as a volunteer to support Cuibul Artistilor and later on, other members of TC appreciated and saw the potential in this initiative and they joined me (working hybrid as volunteers or paid - below market level). Together we developed a great product used by tens of thousands of users: