The Highway: High-Performance Hospitality Platform

The Brief The Highway Restaurant required a digital transformation. They needed an online presence that was faster than a WordPress template and more flexible than a SaaS builder. The goal was to build a highly performant, custom solution to manage stock, process orders, and engage customers without the bloat of heavy frameworks. The Engineering Instead of reaching for Laravel or React, I engineered a custom MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture from scratch to handle the application logic. Infrastructure as Code: The entire application is containerized using Docker and Nginx, ensuring identical environments from development to production. Database Design: I implemented a normalized MySQL 8.0 schema accessed via PDO, ensuring secure, transaction-safe inventory management and order processing. Performance First: The frontend utilizes Vanilla JavaScript and modern CSS (Grid/Flexbox). By avoiding heavy client-side bundles, the site achieves near-instant load times and smooth 60fps animations on mobile devices. Key Takeaway Building a framework-less application taught me the fundamentals of request lifecycles, routing logic, and state management that modern tools often abstract away. It proved that "modern" doesn't always mean "complex"—sometimes the best solution is raw, optimized code.