System Integration Developer in Budapest, Hungary

Themosis-based, highly customized CMS for a multinational dietary supplement manufacturer. At the core, it is a WordPress site, which was the customer's specific requirement because they wanted their marketing team to maintain the content using a familiar interface. On the other hand, it runs inside a Laravel wrapper that provides the framework for the integrations to their corporate systems to pull in product information, forward information to CRM systems, and apply external indexing services to deliver powerful search capabilities. The project has been implemented, so that part of the integrations is presented to the content editors as custom-built Gutenberg blocks with a React-based dynamic admin UI and a low-overhead Blade templating-based rendering for the public.

The site also features a store locator, which allows content editors to pick places from Google Places to feature on the site. It applies multiple heuristics to show the most relevant results for various queries. The customer was so satisfied that they decided to extend the project to roll out the solution to eight additional countries across western and central Europe.

One of my first project as a freelancer was to build a solution for a webshop owner who needed their WooCommerce shop database to be populated from and kept in sync with the databases of product vendors.

I've created an architecture which separated the extraction, transformation and loading of information. The plug-in is configurable in terms of what transformations should be applied in each step.

Since the feeds contain around 30k products performance is paramount. The plug-in has been optimised by profiling the PHP code to identify most resource hungry parts, and rewriting them, applying caching and reorganising loops to reduce overhead. The sync can process deltas to achieve faster completion or full sync, if needed.

Since there are huge amounts of transformation to apply and also downloading of remote assets like product images a sync run may take anything between 20m to few hours. To keep this feasible within the limitations of PHP a custom task scheduler and workflow manager is created, which ensures execution always stays within the available execution time and memory limits, and triggers a new process until the procedure is finished.

The solution is a standard WordPress plug-in respecting the systems constraints.

The project scope was the integration of a public facing website, a CRM system and email marketing tools. The goal was to create forms on a website, where visitors can submit questions and consultation requests also to subscribe to newsletters.

The submissions in turn result in Leads being created in the CRM system. Also if the visitor checked the subscribe box on the form, the contact details are added to a third database, which acts as a data synchronisation and distribution hub for email marketing systems that are used to organise subscribers and run campaigns.

The email marketing part was handled by another contractor working on a separate codebase, so we agreed on a shared format for the data representation.

I've created a small micro-service using Codeigniter PHP framework, that provided API endpoints to add subscribers and create lead forms. The micro-service was then responsible to make the required changes in the CRM system and to populate the predefined data tables with marketing data.

Submitting of the web forms only required a single API call to the micro-service, which in turn could perform multiple operations against the CRM, like looking up if there is an existing customer already or retry failed API calls.