Just shipped a full restaurant management system. Not a landing page, an entire control room. 🍕 Here's what's actually running under the hood: → A customer-facing ordering site, menu, deals, live delivery tracking → A live order dispatch pipeline the kitchen and riders work off in real time → A customer directory tracking every order, every repeat buyer, every average ticket size → A full analytics hub: revenue, top-selling items, rider performance, all updating live, zero manual entry → A menu manager the owner can update themselves, no dev needed for a price change Stack: Next.js, Express, MongoDB, WebSockets. The part that actually took the most thinking wasn't the UI. It was making "real-time" mean something; every number on that dashboard had to be trustworthy the second an order landed, not five refreshes later. Going to break down a few of the harder problems from this build over the next few posts, starting with the one that cost me the most hours: getting revenue numbers