May 2025 – present

A reservation-and-order system for gongsegae, a small café in Seongnam.

gongsegae is a neighborhood café where we were regulars. At some point it grew so popular that the line stretched past the door, and a single coffee could take thirty minutes. The owner tried taking reservations through Google Forms, but an order that involves choosing bread types and quantities was more than a form could hold. It was awkward for guests to use and hard for the owner to manage. So we decided to build the reservation site ourselves. The first version ran on the lightest structure possible, with no backend and Google Sheets serving as a simple database, but the early days of operation made its limits clear, and the service gained a proper backend and admin. It has grown little by little since, and more than a year on, we still stop by the café, talk with the owners, and add what's needed.

Built through the steps below, and refined little by little for over a year. · screen design: every screen designed by hand in Figma; the mood followed the taste of the owner, who used to work at Toss, with layouts referencing ordering services like Coupang Eats · first version: no admin; data lived in Google Sheets, connected through Apps Script, a minimal structure that ran on the sheet alone · admin build: as the early structure hit its limits, a proper backend and web admin, bringing order confirmation, payment checks, quantity management, and logs into one place · notifications: from email templates for bank-transfer guidance to KakaoTalk alerts · automation: automatic slot closing based on per-slot stock, and dough calculation from daily order volume · server redundancy: a redundant setup for the rush of concurrent connections at each reservation opening