Holiday Caravans Direct was one of the most significant engagements of my career. I inherited a struggling project with offshore resources being rolled off, and what began as a development contract quickly became a full technical leadership role. Within weeks of joining, I presented a project recovery strategy directly to the business owners and took sole responsibility for the platform's architecture, development, and delivery.

The platform was a UK-wide marketplace connecting private caravan owners with holidaymakers - distinct from traditional management platforms because owners retained control of their listings while gaining access to a broader booking audience. This legacy modernisation project required rebuilding the system from the ground up using .NET Core 5 and Vue.js, replacing a .NET Framework MVC application that was structurally procedural and difficult to extend.

I applied the strangler pattern to manage the migration, wrapping the existing Newman Holiday Homes SQL database in an API layer. This allowed the platform to treat the legacy system as a third-party integration, maintaining data continuity while the new architecture evolved. The approach reduced page load times by approximately 50% and dramatically improved search performance - from 10-20 seconds down to 1-2 seconds against a test dataset of 5,000 caravans.

One of my proudest achievements was the SEO pre-release strategy I designed and executed. Before the booking features were complete, I launched the platform with park and location pages to build search engine presence. Over 3-6 months, we achieved exponential growth in Google rankings - our park pages frequently appeared above the parks' own websites. This generated significant interest from caravan owners before full launch.

The project required translating complex technical decisions for non-technical stakeholders. I guided the business through Agile practices, drawing on my Scrum training from previous roles, and learned to communicate trade-offs in terms they understood - comparing Vue.js versus jQuery to the difference between a booking platform and a single advert.

The platform launched successfully with approximately 30 new caravan owners alongside the integrated Newman Holiday Homes listings. Unfortunately, pandemic-related funding constraints meant the project was discontinued in early 2022, but the experience fundamentally shaped my approach to technical consulting and client communication.