Tech Stack

What I reach for, and why

A list of technologies says very little. What matters is why each one was chosen over the alternative, and what it cost.

FlutterCross-platform app framework: One codebase carrying two genuinely different products — the diner app and the owner app — behind a routing gate. The alternative was two native codebases for a team of one.
ProviderState management: Enough structure to keep state out of widgets without the ceremony of a heavier solution. For an app this size, more machinery would cost more than it returns.

NestJSBackend framework: Its module and provider system is why DealPlate's twenty-plus domains stayed navigable. Guards and parameter decorators let the auth boundary be declared rather than repeated.
TypeScriptLanguage: End to end — API, admin console and this site. With Prisma's generated types it means a schema change surfaces as a compile error rather than a runtime surprise.
class-validatorRequest validation: Applied as a global pipe with whitelist and transform, so unknown properties are stripped and params are typed before any handler runs.

PostgreSQLPrimary database: Relational because the domain is relational — users, restaurants, promotions and coupons are nothing but relationships. Indexes on lat/long, zip and city make proximity a database concern.
PrismaORM and migrations: The migration workflow is the real value. Ten incremental migrations tell the story of how the product changed; a rewritten schema tells you nothing.

Firebase AuthFederated identity: Email/password and Google sign-in without owning credential storage. One identity across the mobile app and the admin console.
JWT + PassportSelf-issued tokens: The other approach, used in i-Bank — full control over token contents and lifetime, at the cost of owning the security surface yourself.

Next.js (App Router)Web framework: Server Components keep content on the server and JavaScript off the client. Route groups let the admin console share a layout without sharing an auth posture.
Tailwind CSSStyling: Design tokens as CSS variables, consumed as utilities — which is what makes a single theme switch flip the whole site coherently.
shadcn/uiComponent primitives: Components copied into the repo rather than installed as a dependency. Accessible defaults that stay editable instead of fighting a library's opinions.
MotionAnimation: Scroll and transition animation that respects prefers-reduced-motion. Motion should confirm a change, not announce itself.

ClaudeStructured extraction: Reads a photographed restaurant flyer into typed promotion fields against a fixed JSON schema. Constrained output, not free generation — and it fails closed when unconfigured.
Groq / WhisperSpeech to text: Called directly from the device on the user's own key, so audio never passes through infrastructure of mine.