From: January 2013
To: March 2015
Photo by Hugo Barbosa on Unsplash
I was lucky to be involved at a fairly early stage in the life of MacMate (now WebMate.) - a popular SaaS product for web hosting, cloud storage and email management for a local award-winning ISP.
The platform had not long launched and gained it’s first thousand users from an advertising campaign to meet the needs of MobileMe customers who were left without an equivalent offering on the market after Apple discontinued its service.
As a part of a small team, and on a trial-by-fire as a junior hire initially, I assisted in the creation of many features including some small and medium-sized projects.
During my time working on MacMate I learned about Agile methodologies, estimation and restrospectives, teamwork in a software development team and many practical technical skills in PHP and JavaScript.
We operated a continuous integration platform and aimed for an aggressive release schedule. This required team discipline and accountability to fix those broken builds!
An ambitious uptime target meant that applications had to be able to understand a high-availabilty environment and fail fast to allow load balancers to direct traffic to working nodes in the cluster.
Galleries
A good sized project during my time was a revamp of the existing gallery functionality in MacMate. Using lazy-loading and queued thumbnailing techniques to provide a smooth user experience with no upper bound on the size of a single gallery.
The development cycle included optimisation and refinement with user acceptance critera and regular review.
The updated software was successfully released and is still in use today.
The user-limit problem
As MacMate approached 10,000 users a bottleneck was discovered in how application sandboxing was specified, causing some disruption. I devised a plan to rework the user switching system without any downtime to existing clients and the smallest possible maintenance window for release.
Of utmost importance was user data integrity and siloing- user data must not be accessible to another user through malicious or accidental means.
This limit was successfully avoided and the new user system allowed for an effectively unlimited amount of user accounts to exist.
Billing APIs
In order to improve the onboarding process for MacMate, we implemented custom modules for WHMCS, the billing platform. This was in conjunction with a move to replace an older billing platform that was no longer sustainable for the business.
The goal was to create an automated sign-up process via a registration form through to creating the account and completing set-up serverside. The final piece of the puzzle was to enable automated billing for the new accounts- of which one was a free tier, which has a special type in the billing software. Users could also opt to up- or downgrade their package at any time.
This project turned out to be more of an investment of time than originally estimated, with many pitfalls to the WHMCS software that had to be accounted for.
The integration work was successfully completed and existing billing accounts were migrated.