we have café at home
side quest no. 4: building a coffee order tracking and menu customization app for everyone hosting coffee shop parties
I’m not a going-out party type of person, I’ll take a cozy night in with a bowl of fruit and book any day. It’s actually quite rare to catch me out past 10 p.m. If you do, I either love you and will make a bedtime exception because me being there at your party means a lot to you, or, I didn’t know how to make my exit during a previous pre-9 p.m. engagement which has run past its time. Either way, I’m slangry, I’m dangerous, and you should probably stay clear from my path.
There is one party I’ll make an exception for. And that is, the coffee shop party.
I love these parties because they’re held during broad daylight, everyone is caffeinated, and there are no attire expectations. You just show up wearing whatever’s comfortable and hang out. And did I mention there is caffeine(!!!)
I’ve hosted a few of these, and honestly if I had the time and space for it, I’d probably host more.
Here’s me + my friend hosting our first coffee shop party:
Inspired by the coffee shop party + my desire to improve my AI prompting skills + my love for bundling things together to feed two birds with one scone, I vibe-coded an coffee shop ordering app!
Some fun features:
AI-powered menu builder based on Vi🅱️es
Personal digital cafe-fronts with QR code generation + shareable links for guests to order straight from their phones 📱
Real-time order tracking system so your friends don’t have to find you and ask about their order when you accidentally forgot about it while they’ve been talking to others awkwardly thinking about what to do with their hands because they didn’t have a prop to hold like everyone else🧍🏻♀️
Anyways, here it is: https://cafecina.lovable.app/
This one took 651 prompts and 414 AI Edits.
There’s a lot more I can probably do with this, either adding more features or actually doing some more rigorous QA. But what’s most immediately next for me is probably to actually host a coffee shop party and see if this passes the smoke test.
Until then, catch me back in the kitchen testing out new drink and pastry (specifically the one and only Texas sausage kolache (or klobásník, for the purist pedants 🫵) recipes :)