I build the software I needed on the restaurant floor.

Vienna, Austria.

Twenty years in gastronomy — fifteen as Chef de Rang, the last five as Restaurant Manager. The back office was always the same picture: the same numbers written down in three places, and none of them arriving in time to change anything. In April 2026 I started writing the program I had spent years wishing for. I have been writing it every day since.

A desktop application for the back office of a restaurant. Not another sales dashboard — it covers the work that happens after service:

• the nightly close, in a form a tired closer will actually finish
• stock that moves with each delivery, not at month-end
• rosters and hours in the same file as everything else
• one screen for what needs attention today, instead of last month

Desktop rather than web, deliberately: a restaurant's numbers stay on the restaurant's own machine, and the program has to work when the connection does not.

Closed source. Alpha, one user — me. Everything below is measured from the repo.

Electron · React · TypeScript · Vite · Tailwind · Zustand · SQLite via better-sqlite3-multiple-ciphers, encrypted at rest

The program holds wages, sales figures and supplier prices. So the security model was written down and locked before it was implemented — a decision matrix dated the day after the first commit.

• Renderer is not trusted: contextIsolation: true, nodeIntegration: false
• Passwords hashed with Argon2
• TOTP multi-factor login, with BIP39 recovery codes
• Encrypted database, guarded schema, versioned migrations
• Login lockout, session boundary, audit trail
• Offline licence tokens signed with Ed25519 — the private key never enters the repo

About 7,800 of those lines are the security layer alone.

POS exports are read directly — CSV, XLSX and a vendor-specific format. Nothing gets retyped, because everything that gets retyped eventually gets retyped wrong.

Significant decisions go into a dated record before they are implemented: the reasoning, the alternatives, and what was rejected and why. There are around fifteen such records so far. Working documentation is in German — the product is built for kitchens in Austria.

Twenty years in gastronomy. Fifteen of them as Chef de Rang; the last five as Restaurant Manager — the one who has to answer for the numbers at the end of the month.

Everything I know about how a kitchen's numbers actually get written down, I learned standing in one. That is the part I could not have read in a book, and it is the reason this program looks the way it does rather than like the ones sold to restaurants by people who have never closed one.

Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate — Coursera

Spreadsheets, SQL, R, and how to present a number someone will act on.

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