Kingsmen Café
A mobile pre-ordering app for a coffee shop in a school library, with Square payments.
- Years
- 2017–2018
- Status
- Archived
- Code
- Open source
What it was
Kingsmen Café was a coffee shop set up in the library of Christian Heritage School, a small private K–12 school in Trumbull, Connecticut. I built its ordering app with the school's Business Acumen class of juniors and seniors, fresh out of high school myself.
It was my first full-stack app for a real business. We shipped version 1.0 and a few updates. Then school workloads caught up with the business lead and me, and the project ended.
Later I cleaned up the code and made it public. The design decisions I made here still inform my work.
What it did
- Pre-ordering
- Order ahead from a menu of drinks and snacks that the business could change itself.
- Square payments
- Pay in advance through Square, including cardless payment options.
- Community hub
- School announcements, live store hours, and each student's class schedule.
- Native iOS app
- Built in Swift for iPhone.
The problem
What the café needed
- Long waits during peak hours
- Few convenient ways for students to order
- No integrated payments
- No place for community news and events
What the app delivered
- Mobile pre-ordering to cut wait times
- Payments built into the app
- A community information hub
- A simple, fast mobile interface
What I learned
Payments. Working with Square's payment SDK taught me how to handle secure mobile payments.
Real business needs. I had to balance what the technology could do with how the café and its customers actually worked.
Fast mobile flows. Ordering had to be quick without losing the options people wanted.
Built with
- App
- iOS SDK and Swift
- Payments
- Square
- Backend
- Node.js and Express
- Data and hosting
- MongoDB Atlas and Heroku