Updating a Data Center’s Customer Portal

Daycohost is one of the largest data centers in Venezuela. They host important systems for banks and businesses.

In 2020, their customer portal was outdated and hard to use. Both customers and developers had problems with it.

I joined the team at Consultores UCAB to rebuild it. We wanted to make it modern, fast, and easier to use.

Working with Old Systems

This wasn’t a simple project. We couldn’t just start fresh because we had to work with old systems that had been running for years.

The new portal had to connect to these old backend systems that weren’t well documented. My job was to make the modern website work with the old backend.

I spent weeks figuring out how these old systems worked. I analyzed SOAP responses and built a translation layer using NestJS. This layer took messy data from the old systems and converted it into clean, easy-to-use data for our new website.

Building the New Portal

For the frontend, we used React. This was a big change from the old portal, which reloaded the entire page every time you clicked something. We built a Single Page Application that felt much faster.

I built the Executive Dashboard, which is the main screen customers see when they log in. It showed real-time information about their servers, service status, and billing alerts all in one place. It had to be fast and accurate.

I also built the Support Ticketing System. When customers report problems at a data center, it’s urgent. I made sure that when someone filed a critical issue, it went directly to the right team at Daycohost, which made response times much faster.

Consulting, Not Just Coding

Consultores UCAB is a consulting firm, so the job was more than writing code. I sat in requirements sessions with Daycohost’s stakeholders, translated their business processes into technical specifications, and guided the integrations with their existing systems.

Those conversations shaped the product more than any framework choice. When you understand why a bank needs a report at 8 a.m., you build a very different portal.

Deployments in 5 Minutes, Not 2 Hours

Releases were manual when I joined. Each deployment took 1 to 2 hours and depended on someone doing every step in the right order. Mistakes happened.

Nobody asked me to fix this. I proposed and built the team’s first automated deployment pipeline anyway. Deployments dropped to 5 minutes, and human error disappeared from the release process. The portal served 100+ companies and 500+ users, so every safe deployment mattered.

What I Learned

This project taught me that you can’t always start from scratch when building software. Sometimes you have to work with old code that’s already running important systems.

Good engineering means building new, modern tools that work with old systems without breaking anything. We gave Daycohost’s customers a much better experience while keeping all their critical systems running smoothly.