My Cuistot
Meal booking platform connecting customers with home cooks — web, mobile, and backend for a three-person startup.
Role
Full-stack design and development of the backend, mobile app, and website: APIs, meal booking, and performance optimization.
Architecture
Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, NuxtJS, Ionic — API-first platform serving web and mobile, with SSR for SEO and Dockerized deployment.
Results
Production platform with meal booking on web and mobile, WordPress replaced by a performant NuxtJS site, and improved bounce rates after performance audits.
Context
My Cuistot is a meal booking platform that connects customers with home cooks. Built within a three-person startup, the product needed a solid backend, a cross-platform mobile app, and a modern website to replace a legacy WordPress setup.
The challenge was delivering a full product stack — API, admin, mobile, and web — with a small team, while evolving the platform as new features were requested.
Goals and Constraints
- Design and implement a backend API serving both web and mobile clients
- Enable customers to discover and book meals online
- Ship a native-feeling mobile app for Android and iOS
- Replace WordPress with a modern, SEO-friendly website
- Keep transactional emails reliable and responsive
- Improve performance and reduce bounce rates
Solution and Architecture
The backend was built with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, and ActiveAdmin, containerized with Docker. MJML powered responsive email templates, with SendGrid handling transactional delivery. New APIs and model adaptations were added as the product evolved.
The mobile app for Android and iOS was built with Ionic 1.x and Angular 1.x, consuming the shared backend APIs, with Google Firebase for push notifications and CircleCI for build, publish, and lint pipelines.
The website started as VueJS 2.x with Webpack for meal booking, then migrated to NuxtJS with server-side rendering for better architecture, performance, and SEO. Desktop and mobile interfaces were designed in Figma and integrated against the backend APIs.
Technical Decisions
- API-first Rails backend: a single API layer serving both the website and the mobile app
- WordPress to NuxtJS migration: SSR for SEO and landing-page performance, replacing a brittle CMS
- Ionic for cross-platform mobile: one codebase for Android and iOS with shared backend endpoints
- MJML + SendGrid: responsive transactional emails without maintaining separate template stacks
- CircleCI CI/CD: automated build, publish, and lint for the mobile release pipeline
- Performance-first iterations: targeted optimizations after audits to reduce bounce rates
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