Baby Sisters – Babysitting Booking Platform

Baby Sisters case study — Full-stack rebuild: discovery, booking, scheduling and payments for a childcare marketplace

Client:

Baby Sisters

Date:

2020–2021

Duration:

8 months
Baby Sisters – Babysitting Booking Platform
Full-stack work on the Baby Sisters babysitting platform, a two-sided marketplace in Portugal where families book sitters. Bookings, payments, notifications, plus a migration of the existing codebase onto current framework versions.
Baby Sisters booking flow — Availability and bookings across sitters and familiesBaby Sisters sitter discovery — Search and filter babysitters by area, rate and skills

About the client

Baby Sisters connects families in Portugal with vetted babysitters, for a single evening or an ongoing arrangement. Sitters use it to find work and manage their own availability.

Project Overview

Baby Sisters is a marketplace with two sets of users who want opposite things. Families want a sitter available on Thursday. Sitters want work that fits around the rest of their week. The product has to serve both without making either one feel like the afterthought.That shows up in the mechanics: search and availability, the booking flow itself, user management, and payments. Payments are where a marketplace is judged. If money is late, wrong, or unexplained, the trust is gone and no amount of interface polish brings it back.A large part of the project was less visible. I refactored the existing codebase and moved it onto current versions of its frameworks, with business logic and user-facing behaviour staying exactly as they were. The point was that the next year of development should cost less than the last one.This is a small-to-medium business, not a funded scale-up, so the architecture had to be sized honestly for that.

The Challenge

The two-sided part is the hard part. A booking is one record but two separate workflows, and availability has to be true from both directions at the same moment.Then there is everything that happens when nobody is looking. Reminders, booking updates and status changes run on scheduled jobs and push notifications, and those are the features users only notice when they fail.

My Contribution

I worked across the stack. On the frontend, React, improving the booking flow for families and sitters alike. On the backend, Laravel services covering bookings, payments, notifications and the scheduled jobs behind them.Most of my time went to the migration: modernising the codebase and moving it to newer framework versions without changing anything users could see. Deliberately unglamorous work.This is a live marketplace with real money moving through it, so the bar was that scheduling, payments and notifications keep behaving exactly as before, every single time.

Technology Stack

  • React, Laravel, full-stack web application architecture, booking and scheduling systems, payment processing, push notifications, cron jobs
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