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  Caterify Showcase

Caterify

How do we come up with Caterify

Some of us have used home catering services for a long time. It simplifies our life by not having to cook or think about what to eat every day. Other than that, different home catering services provide different values for different users. There’s cheap catering, healthy catering, diet catering, vegan catering, and many more!

However, our experience of communicating and subscribing to a home catering was bad. On top of that, after doing quick research with some catering owners, we realized that they have a LOT of business processes to do, which hinders them from doing the thing that actually matters, which is to prepare delicious home-cooked meals.

What Caterify does

Caterify allows home cooks to kickstart their own home catering business through the app. They could post their catering menu into the app and share them with customers in the area.

Customers would be able to look for any home catering service near them along with their menu, then they could subscribe to the home catering services that they want and pay through the app.

Catering owners will be able to see and organize all paid customer orders in the app, they can also group them into each date. So, they can easily determine how many portions they need to prepare for the day.

When food for the day is prepared, catering owners can simply request a pickup from delivery couriers through the app. Then delivery couriers would come to pick up the orders and deliver them to all the subscribing customers.

How Caterify was built

Caterify is built for iOS on top of a Laravel-based backend. Our backend is engineered by our backend engineer, Farrel Anshary. Then, Farrel along with our other mobile engineers, Joanda Febrian and Meichel Rendio, developed the mobile app using SwiftUI, Apple's latest framework for building user interfaces. While our engineers are building the core functionality of our app, our UX designer, Hanif Putra, designed the high-fidelity prototype, so that Caterify could have a great UX.

Challenges and accomplishments

During the development of Caterify, we need to use the Google Maps API, which is something new for all of us. So, of course, it was pretty challenging at first. But, after reading and understanding the documentation, we successfully implemented it to our app.

Another challenge is that, because SwiftUI is relatively new and has major updates every year, there are not many resources we could read to fix our bugs, and on top of that SwiftUI bugs gave the most random error description ever. Also, sometimes we have to still combine UIKit with SwiftUI for stuff like UIImagePickerController and Google Maps API. However, we believe that the future of iOS development will be in SwiftUI, so we love learning more about it.

Finally, the biggest challenge for us is maybe lack of sleep since we want to give it our all for our first hackathon xD.

We feel like our idea has potential, and because this is the very first hackathon for each one of us, being able to develop such a great app within a short amount of time felt like a huge accomplishment for us.

What's next for Caterify

There’s still a lot of things in our mind that we want to add to Caterify. Here’s some to name a few:

• Delivery system (either in-house or partnership with some ride-hailing company)
• A more robust and complete system that could support all different operational procedures (ala-carte pre-orders, meal times options, and customizable packages)
• Rating and review system for Catering, so they can improve their business
• Reusable meal containers system (to reduce plastic wastes from plastic packaging)

We’d love to continue developing Caterify, but since most of us here have little experience in the industry, it’s unlikely that Caterify could become our main project and the bread and butter of our early careers.


Most likely, if our concept is deemed valid, we’d continue to develop it as a side project while learning more about the industry through a full-time job in a well-established tech company. Then, when our concept has enough traction and found a product-market fit, we’d love to develop Caterify seriously and start a startup company.

Notes

Check out the links we posted in DevPost, we've posted our prototype, demo, and GitHub so you can explore and try our demo.

Built With

• combine
• laravel
• php
• swift
• swiftui