Culinary events platform: years of maintenance and a UK launch

We keep a Dutch culinary events platform stable through high-traffic ticket sales — and refactored its legacy Symfony core so the same system could launch in the UK.

2 countries served by one platform
0 downtime during peak ticket campaigns

The client organises popular culinary walking events where participants visit several restaurants in one afternoon. Everything — tickets, participants, restaurants — runs through their own web platform, built years ago on Symfony and jQuery.

The challenge

  • An older Symfony codebase carried all business-critical operations, including a legacy API behind their native mobile app.
  • Ticket sales spike hard when a campaign lands — the platform simply may not go down.
  • The system was hardcoded for the Dutch market, while the business wanted to expand into the UK.

What we did

As the client’s long-term technical partner we combined steady maintenance and support with deliberate modernisation:

  • Stabilised the existing stack and supported live operations around weekend events and evening tours.
  • Maintained and patched the legacy mobile API so the app kept working while the web platform evolved.
  • Tuned MySQL reporting queries to speed up the operational dashboards the team uses daily.
  • Refactored the core for multiple markets and locales — currency handling in EUR and GBP, localised content — which enabled the UK launch on the same platform.

The outcome

The platform now powers events in both the Netherlands and the UK, has handled peak campaign traffic without downtime, and keeps gaining features on a core that was supposedly “too old” — its lifespan extended instead of thrown away.

“They have been reliable and fast developers that have helped us enormously with all our needs. Happy to keep working with you!” — founder, culinary events platform

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industry

Events & hospitality (Netherlands / UK)

tech stack

Symfony, MySQL, jQuery

service

Maintenance & Support

system risk check

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