When people are traveling or living away from home, they usually don't get to experience home cooked food. To address this issue I collaborated with several friends to create ChefNextDoor, a website where anyone can book an experience of eating a home cooked meal at the someone's home nearby and having an opportunity for great conversation over food.

Our app is focused not on the food itself but rather the cultural experience of eating home cooked food with a chef. We see it as having potential to be popular with tourists who want an authentic meal with locals, as well as college students who want to eat food that reminds them of home. Our team was highly multicultural, with our five team members being from five different countries.

We created a functional beta version of ChefNextDoor which we presented at Dartmouth's Technigala 25W conference. We decided to not continue the project beyond a beta but all learned a lot from it and made considerable progress.

ChefNextDoor was built by the following team: Arthur Zarins, Pacifique Mucyo, Scottie (Miaoyi) Yang, Rohan Ray, and Rohan Ramesh. During the project we divided up the work so each of us could focus on different components of the app; for example some team members worked on the frontend and others worked on authentication.

I was the main backend developer on ChefNextDoor where I designed and then implemented the backend API's router. I also created MongoDB database models for user accounts & experiences, as well as controllers for the models. An important user flow feature I focused on was the website's 3-step "handshake" agreement between a chef and customer: the chef first posts an experience, the user sends a request for that experience, and then the chef approves the request.

Over the course of this project I worked with React for the frontend, Express and Node.js for backend, and MongoDB for the database. We used Render.com to deploy the website and Vite as a bundler. I also programmed user-upload image submission and retrieval using AWS S3, used in the experience submissions.

Overall this project went quite well and I demo'd the beta version of the website at Dartmouth's 2025 Winter Technigala Conference.