Eating with the Chefs is a Berlin based startup aimed at bribing luxurious dinning experience to your home at an affordable price. Some of the best chefs in Germany create world class meals which are then re-created, blast chilled and then brought to you. Ideal for romantic or family dinners, special occasions and for people who pay special attention to the quality and feel of the food they eat daily. Eating offers a wide variety of healthy and gourmet food, launch and fitness boxes, as well as selected wines, beers and juices.

I was responsible for managing and executing the development related side of the business acting as remote CTO. Ivo Yankov from Devlabs helped me with development and together we managed to bring the website to a whole new level – optimized server configuration, SSL with HTTP/2, PHP 7, using AWS and CDN, fully responsive and optimized design, session tracking and recording and many more. The website itself is WordPress/WooCommerce based and using the Roots stack making it pleasant for development and in the same time on the cutting edge of technology using Bedrock, Vagrant, Capistrano, Ansible, Gulp.

This project was done under CodeControl – again a Berlin based company that aims at bringing high end programming services. Working with them is extremely interesting and fruitful as they always hire only the best developers out there. They have an office in Betahaus Sofia, which I visit regularly to share experiences and knowledge with the rest of the Sofia based team. CodeControl is also working closely with Camplight and we are already working on several interesting projects together.

The last redesign we did for Eating was very successful an was done around switching the business model to be subscription based. We had two food lines – Eating Clean and Eating with the Chefs. I am very proud that we as a development team managed to do a lot of custom functionality on top of the standard WooCommerce logic to be able to implement the complicated production and delivery logic Eating had.

Sadly in October 2016 even tough sales were going up and we already had hundreds of active subscriptions the business went bankrupt as the key investor stepped out of the project. Working on Eating presented a lot of challenges and the team and atmosphere were great so it was sad for me to see it shut down this way.