Shared-Codebase Chip Specification Data Portals

Problem

A young company in car performance tuning needed a way to give its customers and partners chip specification data. There were several kinds of data, and each kind needed its own page. The company was small and had no developer, so it needed one person to build the whole thing and keep it running.

Approach

• I built the platform alone, from the first line of code to the live site.
• I worked as a freelancer for the owner, next to my main job at the time.
• I made one shared codebase for all the pages, so a new kind of data did not mean a new project.
• I took care of deployment and maintenance myself, including fixes and changes after launch.
• I also built the landing pages for the company, so it could present itself and start selling.

Architecture and design decisions

• The platform has 7 to 8 portals, and each one shows a different kind of chip specification data.
• All portals run on one codebase that I wrote from scratch.
• I used Angular and JavaScript for the part visitors see, PHP for the part behind it and CSS3 for the layout.
• I kept the shared parts in one place, so one fix or one new feature reached every portal.

Outcomes

• I delivered 7 to 8 data portals from a single codebase.
• I owned the whole life of the platform, from development to deployment to maintenance.
• The company could launch because the platform and the landing pages were ready.
• The owner kept working with me for about two and a half years.

Known gaps

• I have no numbers on how many people used the portals or how much data they held.
• I do not describe where the data came from, what format it had or how it was updated.
• The page does not say how the portals differed from each other inside the shared code.
• I do not cover hosting, performance or uptime.
• I do not know if the platform still runs today.