Help The Benson Place Rebuild our Reservations System

The Benson Place is looking for someone to help us build a custom reservations and online sales system. We previously had a working but poorly designed system written in ColdFusion, and we think it can be used as a reference for a lot of the functionality we need.

Here are our needs:

The system must be mostly complete (ready to use if not finished permanently) by June of this year.

The project must be open source and use a free license

We will self-host the reservation system

It must be fast and reliable, written in a decent programming language (not PHP)

The web interface must be simple, minimalit, aesthetic, and intuitive.

Resilience to stupid customers doing everything wrong out of ignorance is a must. Basic resilience to malevolent actors trying to hurt our business is also important, but we don't need a super fancy security system.

You must be good at staying in communication with Satya (myself) and Meredith (my mother - it's a family farm). Meredith will have input about the functionality and customer experience side of things, and I am the sysadmin and the one who sort of understands what computers do. We will both want to be involved throughout the development process.

Here's a little outline of the core functionality:

We add prepick inventory (in pounds of blueberries/day) and upick inventory (in pounds/hour) to the system using the admin web portal. Then a customer comes along and selects wants to reserve prepicked berries. They can see a menu of days on which we have available prepick inventory (and how many pounds we have available). Since they want 30 pounds, they choose Friday, a day which has planty available. They sign in to their account, which has their contact information and name saved from last year. They select that they want one twenty pound box and one ten pound box and submit their reservation. They receice a confirmation email. They don't have the option to pay anything ahead of time.

Another customer comes along and wants to buy chickens. They choose the number of chickens they want, indicate that they prefer large chickens, and they choose the date and pickup location which they prefer. Then they pay a deposit of $10 per chicken to place their reservation, choosing between Stripe and PayPal as their payment options.

Remember that the whole blueberry reservation system has already been created (albeit poorly) in ColdFusion and will serve as a good starting place or reference, but should be rewritten entirely.

We will pay you as best we possibly can, but know that as a small farm our budget is limited. We hope that part of your motivation will be to contribute to organic community-facing agriculture and create an awesome functional tool which will be used for decades.

If you're interested email me:

mail@satch.xyz

Check out our farm's website:

The Benson Place

(Our actual website is bensonplace.org but this is a faster mirror which is static only)