A live SaaS, taken over and stabilized
Behavioral-finance assessments for advisors
The engagement
The client is a behavioral-finance assessment company - it sells psychometric assessments of financial behavior as a SaaS platform that financial advisors use with their clients. In September 2022, the Durable Programming team was brought in to take over development of the platform from a departing dev team. This was explicitly a rescue-and-transition job - just the kind of thing Durable Programming specializes in.
What we did
- Took over an undocumented Laravel codebase - reconstructed the deploy and runtime environment, chased down missing config and access, and got staging and production reproducible.
- Built a new deploy pipeline with Ansible + Ansistrano - provisioning servers with the exact PHP and Node versions the app needed, plus one-command deploy and rollback.
- Rebuilt a ~900-line database seed so the app could be brought up cleanly from scratch.
- Ran sustained bug-and-enhancement work on the live product - invitations not sending, report charts not rendering, 500 errors on account creation, a CRM integration passing the wrong value, and cross-account data leakage between households.
- Fixed the Stripe billing irregularities - quota accounting per billing cycle and duplicate-invitation handling.
Stack
- PHP / Laravel
- MySQL
- AWS EC2 (load-balanced)
- Ansible + Ansistrano
- Stripe / Rollbar