Somm
The personal assistant for your restaurant's menu
Building Somm, likely as a result of my inexperience in coding, everything felt fragile; held together with wet tissue paper and one errant semicolon ready to crash the entire thing.
So I was afraid to make the big leaps and push the code forward, favoring instead to tweak around the margins and play with the styling. It wasn't until I was confident enough to break things and see the error codes that I was able to meaningfully develop Somm into an actual service.
After all, it's just lines on a screen. You can always undo and try again, wiser than the last time and ready to keep plugging ahead.
I have always been interested in coding: after all, it's what powers our entire web. Of course, the frontend stuff is the most visual and appealing, with backend still remaining frightening and downright imposing.
I first started playing with HTML/CSS, then migrated to Meteor for some realtime databases, and then finally made the leap to React. Through all of this, I've taught myself with tutorials and the invaluable help of user on Github and StackOverflow.
Right now, Somm is running React on Next.js deployed to Heroku, with the backend provided by Google's Cloud Firestore. I'm in love with React and its power and universality, and cannot wait to see what new languages we can fold into Somm in the future.
The concept for Somm has always been to make looking at restaurant menus on-site easier and more powerful. The first idea was for a chatbot, where users could ask questions and get a response. But this was complicated both from a UX and development perspective and likely not what users would have wanted anyway.
So then the design was pivoted to a widget, where users could interact with the menu in powerful ways, encouraging engagement and allowing restaurants insight into how potential diners interact with their menu.
Somm now looks completely different than it did when we started, or even the idea I had in my head when I set out. But that is the beauty of making something and adapting to the needs and desires of the business environment.
Comment