Comanda
Order management system for Costa Rican diners that separates floor and kitchen operations, reducing operational friction and improving coordination from order taking to preparation.
Context
This project was born to support a family-owned soda (a traditional Costa Rican diner) that had always operated using pen and paper, but as the business grew it required a more reliable way to track daily sales.
The system was custom-designed for a business that operates 24/7, meaning the software had to be highly robust, resilient, and fault-tolerant from the ground up.
Although the initial requirement was just a tablet interface for the floor staff to register and manage orders, I later developed a dedicated kitchen view to expand the system's capabilities and make it suitable for other similar businesses.
Screenshots
Tech stack
Key points
Development of a tablet-optimized interface featuring clear role separation between floor order-taking and kitchen preparation tracking.
Implementation of fault tolerance using a local database, enabling the application to continue functioning without an internet connection and synchronize data once the network is restored.
Flexible architecture backed by SQLite, designed to easily support both external cloud deployments and local on-premise execution depending on the business's infrastructure needs.
Learnings
Designing a system for a real-world, high-availability environment prone to power and connectivity outages taught me the critical importance of prioritizing resilience and an offline-first approach.
I learned how to make adaptable infrastructure decisions, building the system to run in the cloud as requested while maintaining the simplicity needed to effortlessly migrate to a local network if the business requires it in the future.