The latest articles on DEV Community by Taaha Bin Zaheer (@taahabz). https://dev.to/taahabz https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4230931%2F498f892e-c62f-4f28-a329-8eec22caf771.jpg https://dev.to/taahabz en Taaha Bin Zaheer Fri, 06 Nov 2026 18:50:45 +0000 https://dev.to/taahabz/i-built-a-live-mess-menu-app-for-my-university-heres-the-stack-and-why-it-stuck-348m https://dev.to/taahabz/i-built-a-live-mess-menu-app-for-my-university-heres-the-stack-and-why-it-stuck-348m <p>Every hostel student at my university wakes up to the same question: <em>what's the mess serving, and is it worth walking down for?</em></p> <p>The "official" answer was a PDF that nobody kept up to date. So I built the thing I actually wanted — a fast page that tells you today's food, with serving times, and lets students rate each meal so you know what you're walking into.</p> <p>👉 <strong>Live:</strong> <a href="https://nustmessmenu.oddmancy.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://nustmessmenu.oddmancy.com</a></p> <h2> What it does </h2> <ul> <li> <strong>Today</strong> — breakfast, lunch and dinner with serving timings, at a glance.</li> <li> <strong>This week</strong> — the full weekly menu so you can plan around the good days.</li> <li> <strong>Ratings &amp; reviews</strong> — students rate each meal, so "chicken karahi" with a 4.5 reads very differently from one with a 1.8.</li> </ul> <p>No login. No ads. Free.</p> <h2> The stack </h2> <p>Deliberately boring, because boring is reliable:</p> <ul> <li> <strong>React + TypeScript</strong> on the frontend.</li> <li> <strong>Cloudflare Workers</strong> serving it from the edge — cheap, globally fast, and it shrugs off traffic spikes (which mattered more than I expected — more on that another day).</li> <li> <strong>A small backend</strong> for the menu + review data.</li> <li> <strong>Tailwind</strong> for styling.</li> <li> <strong>SEO done properly</strong>: server-rendered content, a real sitemap, and structured data — so when someone searches the mess menu, the site actually shows up instead of a stale link.</li> </ul> <h2> What I learned </h2> <p>The engineering here is trivial. The part that made it <em>stick</em> was removing exactly one daily friction for a few thousand people. The ratings turned a lookup tool into something students check <em>and</em> contribute to — that loop is what keeps it alive.</p> <p>If you're building something small, that's the bar worth aiming for: not "impressive," just "used every single day."</p> <h2> Try it </h2> <p>If you're a student (or just curious how the edge setup feels), take a look and leave a review on today's meals:</p> <p><strong><a href="https://nustmessmenu.oddmancy.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://nustmessmenu.oddmancy.com</a></strong></p> <p>Happy to go deep on the Cloudflare Workers + SEO setup in the comments if anyone's interested.</p> webdev react cloudflare showdev