Desco

Problem

Romanian restaurants have adopted QR codes, but almost always just to display a static menu — customers still call the waiter to order. The few providers that go further tend to offer partial solutions: ordering without payment, or a POS without reservations. Nobody is shipping a fully integrated venue management system that covers the entire loop from diner scan to kitchen display to bill settlement. We saw an opportunity to build the full-stack product that the market is missing.

Approach

Started with the owner's workflow, not the tech. Mapped the ordering flow from customer scan to kitchen ticket, then built a hexagonal architecture with factory-injected services — business logic fully decoupled from Next.js and Drizzle, each module independently testable. Chose Neon's serverless driver over a connection pool to stay edge-compatible, and SSE over WebSockets for real-time push because it's simpler to operate. Shipped 12+ domain modules with strict import boundaries and bilingual i18n from day one.

Outcome

Working end-to-end: QR scan, menu browsing, shared baskets, checkout, kitchen display, bill splitting, plus a staff dashboard with real-time tracking, reservations, discount rules, and event scheduling. The hexagonal approach paid off — adding the events and discount modules late in development took days, not weeks. The biggest surprise was how much complexity lives in the session layer (shared baskets, split checkout) vs. the ordering itself.