Petlove - Serviços
Pet services marketplace built to expand and eventually replace DogHero, offering grooming, boarding, daycare, and veterinary services across Brazil.
About the project
Petlove Serviços started as an expansion of the Petlove ecosystem, initially offering grooming, bathing, and acupuncture services. Over time, it incorporated boarding, daycare, and pet sitting, gradually taking over the territory that DogHero had occupied.
The platform connects pet owners with verified caretakers through a multi-service marketplace. Booking, scheduling, and payments run through a Laravel backend, while the frontend is built in Vue.js. The real-time chat between tutors and caretakers runs on a dedicated Elixir service powered by WebSockets. That same Elixir service also served DogHero, making it a shared real-time layer across two completely different stacks.
My role was backend maintenance on the Laravel API and the Elixir chat service. The Vue.js frontend was handled by a dedicated frontend developer, so my work stayed focused on server-side reliability and the real-time layer.
Challenges
Maintaining a system with three distinct technology layers, each with its own deployment and failure modes. The Elixir chat service needed to stay in sync with the Laravel backend without tight coupling, which required careful design of the message flow and fallback behavior.
Working on a platform mid-replacement also meant balancing feature development against the risk of breaking existing flows that real customers depended on every day.
Learnings
Working across PHP, Vue.js, and Elixir in the same product gave me a broader view of how different technologies solve different problems. Elixir is genuinely a better fit for real-time communication than most alternatives, and seeing that choice play out in production made that lesson stick.