Belmont Consultancy

Nieuw Deze Week offers visitors an overview of newly added movies, series, audio books, ebooks and music for popular streaming services. Facing legacy maintenance costs, there was a need to bring the website's technology stack up to date, prepare for future international expansion and allow for further automation through the use of external APIs.

Build a new application using Python Django and Tailwind CSS. Migrate from Google Cloud to dedicated servers using Docker containers combined with Cloudflare caching and statics hosting and add a staging environment.

90% reduction in hosting costs, enabled expansion into the German market with minimal development effort.

A client in the real-estate photography business was looking for a way to more efficiently manage the scheduling of photo shoots to keep up with the growth of its business and team of photographers. The previous process would involve the manual booking of appointments, which was error-prone and made monthly invoicing a cumbersome task. In addition to automation, there was a need to add a confirmation workflow to reduce no-shows.

Created a Python Django application with custom admin screens to provide a fully customized booking screen that is optimized for mobile as well as desktop. To keep technical maintenance to a minimum, Heroku was selected as the PaaS provider. When creating and updating a project, through the use of APIs the system automatically updates the photographer's calendar and creates a uniform project folder in the team's Dropbox. The client then receives an email asking them to confirm the booking, which is logged in the system. On completion of the assignment, the system sends an email with a download link to the client, and the system integrates with a 3rd party invoicing tool to allow the assigment to be invoiced.

Fully eliminated discussions around no-shows and forgotten appointments. 95% reduction in time spent on administering appointments.

Belmont Consultancy is the founder of Downdetector, the world's largest website for reporting and tracking service outages. The platform allows users to report issues with online services and track the status of reported outages in real-time. The platform was acquired by Ookla. Centered around the vision that user reports are the best way to report service disruptions, Downdetector offers the fastest outage detection available in the market today.

Downdetector went through multiple platform iterations to keep up with the growing user base and features, starting with traditional server hosting and moving to a highly scalable cloud environment based on AWS at the time of acquisition. Following the acquisition by Ookla, Belmont Consultancy was asked to stay on board in the role of product owner to ensure a smooth handover. On completion of this process, we decided to return to a role that offered more entrepreneurial freedom.

Sup Rondje Haarlem is an annual paddleboarding race and tour in the city of Haarlem. A website was needed to offer greater visibility. The ability to register beyond a simple form was a welcome addition to reduce manual tasks by the event organisers both leading up to the event and on race-day.