Rebuilding Booker’s front end

Booker started life as a quick side project: a booking app for small service businesses, built on Laravel with the Google Calendar API and WhatsApp integration doing most of the heavy lifting. Customer picks a slot, gets a WhatsApp confirmation, and the business owner never has to touch a spreadsheet again. Simple pitch, and the backend has held up well.

The front end is a different story. It was built fast, to prove the idea worked, and it shows — a pile of jQuery-adjacent JavaScript bolted onto server-rendered views, with just enough state management to be fragile. Every new feature meant carefully avoiding three other things that might break.

So I’m rebuilding it. The plan:

• Keep the Laravel backend and the Google/WhatsApp integrations exactly as they are — they work, and “it works” is not a problem I need to solve twice.
• Replace the ad-hoc front-end JS with a proper component structure so the booking calendar, availability logic and confirmation flow aren’t all tangled together.
• Add real form validation before the API call happens, not after, so users find out about a clash instantly instead of after a WhatsApp message has already gone out.

None of this is glamorous. It’s the kind of rebuild that, if I do it right, nobody notices — the app just feels a bit more solid. I’ll post an update once the new booking flow is live.