Ten years ago I wrote a booking app for a guesthouse, topu.ee. It was PHP on Zend Framework 1. I deployed it and went back to my day job.

Then nothing happened. No 3 a.m. calls, no emergency patches. One day I realised I hadn’t logged into the server for five years in a row. The app had been taking bookings the whole time, like a loyal cat that feeds itself.

Why it survived

It did one job, for one property. It used plain PHP and a conventional framework, with no exotic infrastructure. And a room is free or it isn’t, so the requirements never moved.

Why I rewrote it anyway

Five years without logging in means five years without security updates. The app looked healthy, but it ran an ageing stack on a server I’d stopped looking at. Stable and neglected look the same until they don’t.

I’d avoided a rewrite for years, because it sounded like months of archaeology. With LLMs it turned out to be far easier than I expected. The old excuse, “it works, a rewrite is too much effort,” no longer held.

Lessons

• Stable software still needs someone to watch the patches.
• Small and focused ages better than big and flexible.
• If you’ve been avoiding a rewrite, re-check your estimate.

A new blog post about the new platform is coming soon. Meanwhile, if you run a small hotel or guesthouse and want live room availability on your own website, sign up at bookmeapillow.com.