This was my first full-stack project. I live in Italy and noticed that very few Chinese restaurants around me let guests order from their phones, so I built a QR table-ordering app for them: guests scan the code on the table and order, the kitchen and the pass see the dishes on tablets, and the owner closes the bill after taking payment at the till. Then I went around showing it to restaurants and learned two things I should have learned before writing any code. First, almost every restaurant wanted kitchen tickets printed. Kitchen staff want a piece of paper, not a tablet. I hadn't built printing because it needs a cloud printer that polls the server for new orders, and I didn't have one to test with. Second, the restaurants that already had QR ordering weren't using a feature of their POS, as I'd assumed. They were all on the same Chinese SaaS product. So the lesson I'm taking away is the boring one everybody repeats: talk to a few customers before you build. I also wasted time on things nobody needed yet. I built a whole pickup-order feature and then removed it to keep the first version small. Since the code exists and works, I've open-sourced it (AGPL-3.0). Most of it was written with Claude Code and Codex; I made the product and architecture decisions. It's ASP.NET Core, Postgres and React, it runs in three languages (English, Italian, Chinese), and there's a demo you can start with one docker compose command. https://github.com/lorenzoyang/TavoloFlow If you've built anything for restaurants, I'd like to hear how you handled printing.   submitted by   /u/YangLorenzo [link]   [comments]