Will Bridges

I’ve been working with AllstarLoding.com for years now to improve their site and their business. They went from being relatively small and managing about 20 cabins to managing 100+ properties in about 3 years. I attribute a large part of their success to their website, of course! They now dominate their area in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and are still expanding. The company is also doing well because it’s run by a very sound business man, Carlos Ruiz. He has a lot of foresight and vision. I came to him a year ago when he was thinking about revamping the software I had built him. He wanted to go with an ‘out of the box’ solution and was researching the massive amounts of reservation software out there. I asked him to let me do it in Ruby on Rails and let me sit in on the demonstration for some of these ‘out of the box’ or pre-built solutions. I sat in and gathered all the information I needed to build a very solid reservation system in rails. Now, mind you, I was very new to rails at the time and I’m still cleaning up things that I should have done a different way but it was a learning process and I still created a magnificent piece of software, which is being improved on all the time.

I’m actually working to generalize it so it can be sold to other companies and re-used. There are parts that I built in a very modular fashion but some parts I built very specific to his business. So, now is the tedious part of generalizing, writing tests that should have been written (at the time I wasn’t doing BDD or TDD) and building test instances of the software. This software is not just a reservation system but a complete software solution to vacation rental management and I like to think of it as the tool to use for any vacation oriented business to take over their respective area.