Normal work disappears. Genuine judgment surfaces.
I built Northline Flow for @Lovable’s #lovablechallenge — a fictional owner-operated home-services business in Surrey, BC.
I didn’t want to build another prettier scheduler. The problem I wanted to attack was the handling around the booking.
Routine requests can continue toward booking. Genuine ambiguity reaches the owner as one framed decision. Unsafe or wrong-fit requests stop instead of being forced into the normal booking path.
I also built a deterministic test harness and a playable Morning Shift proof mode: three fictional requests enter the same routing rules, but only one requires a human decision.
The part I’m most excited about is that the challenge itself became reusable. We captured the process from brief → working flow → adversarial testing → cinematic donor → bounded visual integration → playable proof → final freeze.
Building a 4-role real-time SaaS taught me one uncomfortable lesson: the hard part was never the code.
I've been building RestaurantOS — one platform connecting Owner, Kitchen, Waiter, and Cashier in a single live workflow (Table → Order → Kitchen → Serve → Billing → Reports).
The tech stack was the easy part. The real challenge: keeping 4 different roles in sync in real time without any of them stepping on each other's data — a waiter updating a table while the kitchen marks an item ready while the cashier is mid-billing.
That forced decisions most tutorials never cover:
⚡ How much state should live client-side vs. source-of-truth server-side
⚡ What "real-time" actually needs to mean per role (a kitchen screen needs sub-second updates, a report dashboard doesn't)
⚡ Designing failure states — what happens when the waiter's app loses connection mid-order
Currently redesigning the UI/UX layer too (motion, better visual hierarchy) while keeping this real-time core intact.
If you've built multi-role or real-time systems — curious what broke first for you. And if you're a founder who needs something like this built, my DMs are open.