Rebuild

I have just planned to rebuild one of the freelance project. It is not a small project, in fact; it was one of my biggest project last year. It might sound silly for this, but the rebuild is initiated by myself; the company of this project so far is happily using the site without any problem.

So why I plan to rebuild?

• It’s a Laravel 4 based site, so is time to upgrade to Laravel 5.
• There are too many quick hack.
• Didn’t utilize some of the Laravel features like Queue.
• Laravel 5 can work with S3 directly, this allows me to clean lots of unwanted codes.
• Didn’t plan the caching well, quite often I need to refresh the cache manually.

From what I see most likely 50% of the codebase will need to rebuild, it should cost me around 1 to 1.5 month for this. Of course since this is entirely initiated by myself, there won’t be any pay for this, mostly it will be used up what I earn from this project. I believe this consider an investment too because it will be a good practice for rebuild a complete site like this into Laravel5.

Although I can just do the straightforward Laravel 4 to 5 upgrade with minimal rewrite but I don’t think I will do that. This project has been generated 60% revenue for the company and it still not on the high traffic side; it will be a good learning if I can push the limit higher after this rewrite.

How often did you rebuild something for your client without any pay?