Build - July 2026
Run the floor, not the books
BarTab is a point-of-sale app for Spanish bars and restaurants, and the most important decision in it is a list of things it will never do.
It does not do your tax. It does not count stock or run a profit-and-loss. It reconciles the till and runs the floor, and the moment a feature starts drifting towards accounting I stop and put it back. The Spanish bar down the road already has a gestor for the books. It does not need mine as well.
What it does do is the service itself. You open a tab on Mesa 4, add rounds through the night, and each round fires the kitchen and the bar their own prep tickets. Split a bill six ways, settle part in cash and part on card, comp a coffee, void a mistake. Owners get three money screens that never overlap: what is on the floor right now, what actually came in over a period, and the longer trends. None of them pretends to be a spreadsheet.
Scope is a feature
The hard part was not building all that. It was refusing to build the rest. Every screen you add to chase the word "complete" is another screen a waiter has to ignore at eight on a Friday - one tablet, one hand, half a function room waiting. A POS earns its place by being fast and obvious under exactly those conditions, and nothing makes software slow and vague like features nobody at the counter asked for.
Some of the discipline is quieter than a scope rule. A settled tab is never silently reopened or re-priced - once it is paid, it is done, and the audit trail says who did what. Take the payment on the card reader and the tab reconciles itself: "paid" means the money actually moved, not that someone remembered to tap a button. The live updates that light up the floor board fail safely, so if the connection drops, nobody standing at the till even notices.
I have spent most of my career on the other kind of product, the one where more is always the ask. Building for a room full of people carrying plates taught me the opposite, and it is the harder skill: decide what your software is not, write the line down where everyone can see it, and hold it when the next reasonable-sounding feature comes knocking.
All writing - CV