case-study

Shako Kabob: Foodtruck POS

Full-stack point-of-sale and online ordering platform for a food truck, from database schema to automated deploys.

  • React
  • Vite
  • Node.js
  • MySQL
  • Docker
  • GitHub Actions
  • Turborepo
  • Coolify
View on GitHub Live demo
Shako Kabob: Foodtruck POS cover

Problem & user context

A food truck runs on thin margins and fast lines. Shako Kabob needed one system for customer-facing online ordering, employee management, inventory tracking, and sales reporting without per-transaction SaaS fees.

Constraints & tradeoffs

  • Team of 4, real client. I directed the team and split the Turborepo monorepo so frontend, API, and database work could ship in parallel.
  • Relational from day one. Orders, inventory, employees, and sales live across 18+ MySQL tables with foreign-key constraints. The schema keeps reporting queries simple.
  • Self-hosted deploys. GitHub Actions builds Docker images for Coolify with a containerized MySQL instance. Docker layer caching cut build times by 50%.

Architecture

Customers ──► React + Vite storefront (online ordering)
Staff ──────► POS dashboard (employees, inventory, sales)
                 │  REST APIs
                 ▼
             Node.js API ──► MySQL (18+ tables)
                 ▲
   GitHub Actions ──► Docker images ──► Coolify (self-hosted)

Results & lessons

  • Production deployment serving a real business, led end to end by a team of 4.
  • 50% faster CI builds from Docker layer caching + Turborepo task caching.
  • Each hour spent on the entity relationship diagram saved three hours of later implementation.