This installment will take you behind the scenes, offering a glimpse into the conceptional and initial implementation states of the app that was set to become one of the leading Open Source scheduling platforms. As we reflect on the challenges overcome, we also celebrate the resilience of our team and the unwavering commitment to delivering solutions that transcend expectations.
The academic background
While still a technical university student, the creator of Easy!Appointments, Alex Tselegidis, had received the final year project (Bachelor Thesis) of the creation of a web-based software solution that would be able to schedule appointments and automatically sync them with Google Calendar. Till date, those two points still designate the core functionality of the app, although the initial scope was vastly expanded over the past ten years.
As you can imagine though, the preparation of any academic work does not only apply to the practical side of things, so that quite some work was dedicated to answering vital software questions such as to how would availability be best treated and what would the optimal way be to synchronize calendaring data between multiple systems while maintaining high data integrity.
In addition to that, there were other challenges to overcome, such us the proper data role and permissions system, so that the the new app becomes flexible enough to handle any type of business, from standalone individuals to big organizations and companies. All this preparation and research ended up to the incorporation of all the required core components that made Easy!Appointments a piece of software able to readjust and fit any scenario, without major core changes for all these years.
A humble beginning
With a successful Thesis delivery and a high quality codebase, the project was ready to become accessible to the world and help other individuals, technical or not, accept online bookings for their day to day business. Back then, GitHub was not one of the main code hosting services and Git was even not the primary source control system. Alas many developers used to work with Subversion and other source control systems.
At that point Alex decided to publish the first version of the Easy!Appointments under the GPL-3.0 license to Google Projects, a code hosting service from Google that unfortunately no longer exists. Google Projects was a very basic version of what GitHub is basically today, but would allow programmers to collaborate on Open Source software. In addition to that, a dedicated Google Group was created to facilitate the community support and discussion needs.
A couple of months passed by and Open Source enthusiasts started picking up on the project and experiment with it and provide feedback. After a couple of months the first stable release was ready for prime time and the rest is history. With all the great help of the community, we were able to creation a solution that has now become battle-tested and ready to serve any use case, including installations that empower big private and public sector organizations, hospitals, institutions, private individuals etc.
Thank you all for your great support all these years! Great things will become available soon.
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