Building a Booking System - An introduction

introduction

It’s interesting how a situation such as being made redundant can effect you. A combination of facing the prospect of being out of work for awhile made me realise that I needed to build something of my own for a change. The last time I did this, I built a site called Nfolio when I was laid off in 2001. Nfolio was a phtotography social media site long before Facebook etc burst on to the scene and preceded Flickr which a lot of my users migrated to sadly.

Fast forward to 2026, I know of a couple of people who could do with a site revamp, especially in their events booking areas. I look after two sites that are built on Wordpress and to be honest, they needn’t be hosted on this platform, because it’s just too bulky and doing even the simplest things can be cumbersome at best.

Since I am leaving my current employer, I wanted to make use of the time in extracting ideas from the 5 years I’ve spent with them. Now let me be clear, that I am not going to steal code because that would be an IP infringement but I can at least make use of some concepts to build out the shell of the new booking system.

The architecture

• Docker (back-end, database and front-end)
• React (or Vue)
• Nest.js
• Node
• GraphQL
• Tailwind
• Don’t use Primevue?