Smosser is an online platform designed to streamline the entire sandwich ordering process for businesses, schools, and individuals. By eliminating the need for time-consuming phone calls or emails, our solution enables sandwich shops to efficiently manage orders, while saving staff valuable time. For customers, it means no more waiting in line or dealing with payment hassles after the fact—each person can conveniently place and pay for their own order, whether they’re buying individually or as part of a larger group. With Smosser, getting your favorite sandwich has never been easier.
Working on this project, which we started in April 2023 with just three student developers, has been an incredible learning experience. Tackling a platform this complex—complete with secure backend APIs, separate front-end interfaces for customers, a dashboard for sandwich shops to manage their menus, and an admin panel for support—pushed us to continuously teach ourselves new skills. We ventured into AWS to set up the underlying infrastructure from scratch, gradually mastering services that were completely unfamiliar at the start. What began as a solution for businesses soon expanded into offerings for schools and even events. This growth demanded that we learn how to adapt features for different contexts, refine our deployment strategies, and ensure everything ran smoothly at scale. Personally, I discovered a passion for frontend development and UI/UX design along the way. Experimenting with new layouts, color schemes, and interaction patterns—and seeing how users responded—was both challenging and deeply rewarding. The project also included a unique engineering twist. We integrated a Raspberry Pi-based “SmosserHub” into sandwich shops, enabling orders to be directly sent to a label printer on-site. We built this component from the ground up, coding the software in Python. All in all, this journey—from backend security to frontend interfaces, from zero-knowledge infrastructure setup to physical hardware integration—taught me invaluable lessons in problem-solving, innovation, and the satisfaction of watching an idea evolve into a fully functional product.
Smosser is live since the start of 2024 and is currently being used by several businesses, schools and individuals. We are continuously improving the platform and adding new features to make the ordering process even more streamlined.