Volume III · The Stories
Stories from the people
running the floor.
A working journal of restaurant operations, software, payments and the small physical objects in between — written by the people who build, run and rely on ORDR.
In circulation
15 stories
Since 2020 · All free to read
18 Apr 2026
6 min
Off Cloudflare, onto gray-cloud AWS — why and how we moved
In April 2026 we finished moving ORDR from orange-cloud Cloudflare back to a traditional CDN-less AWS setup. Here is why a restaurant POS cares about the intermittent Spain / La Liga IP blocks, what we did, and what we gave up.
17 Apr 2026
6 min
Moving the kitchen TV display off Chromecast — the 2026 hardware landscape
Chromecast with Google TV is discontinued. We have spent the year looking at what replaces it for restaurant order displays — Fire TV, Onn, Vega OS, Apple TV — and here is where we landed.
15 Apr 2026
6 min
Tap to Pay on iPhone in UK hospitality — the state of play in 2026
Tap to Pay on iPhone has quietly become a real option for UK restaurants and bars. Here is what is different, what is the same as a traditional terminal, and why you still probably want a proper card reader on your main counter.
12 Nov 2024
6 min
Per-table QR-code ordering, three years in: what we'd build differently
The pandemic made QR ordering a default. Three years on, the patterns that worked are clear, the dark patterns are clearer, and the temptation to bolt on every clever idea is the thing to resist. A retrospective on the ORDR customer-ordering flow.
8 May 2024
7 min
Multilingual menus: where machine translation gets it wrong, and how we catch it
Machine translation is good enough for prose and dangerous for menus. Dishes are full of proper nouns, regional terms and cultural context that NMT systems mis-handle in specific, repeatable ways. Here is what we have seen go wrong, why, and the review gate ORDR builds in.
22 Apr 2024
7 min
Event ticketing for bars and nightclubs — a year in
A year after we rolled out events inside the ORDR POS, the punchline is the one we hoped for: when ticketing lives inside the till, every paid ticket becomes a pre-paid table, and the third-party 8–12% fee stays at the venue. Here is what we learned, and where third-party platforms are still the right call.
19 Mar 2024
7 min
Monolith for life, except when not — how we split CloudPrint out of the ORDR Rails app
ORDR is a Rails monolith and will stay one. CloudPrint, the printer microservice, had to live somewhere else — but for the boring physical reason that it talks to a thermal printer in a venue, not because the monolith was failing us. The rule we use: split out only when the constraint forces it.
26 Sept 2023
7 min
Switching to Bun: how moving off Yarn cut our local dev startup by 60%
After two years on Yarn, we moved ORDR's JavaScript toolchain to Bun in late 2023. Install time dropped by an order of magnitude, local dev server startup more than halved, and the migration itself took an afternoon. Here is what we changed, what we measured, and what we still use Node for.
26 Apr 2023
6 min
March and April 2023 features update
Phone-friendly staff ordering, a configurable end-of-day cut-off for reports, and product categories surfaced across downloadable reports. Three quality-of-life features bundled into one update.
23 Feb 2023
6 min
February 2023 features update
Payment terminals now work across any number of devices and networks, and our pre-payment flow has had a months-long overhaul based on thousands of real orders.
23 Sept 2022
6 min
Feature: the perfect payment terminal
Card machines. PQDs. Payment terminals. Whatever you call them, they are the lifeline of hospitality. We wanted one that was fast, reconciled to a bill automatically, and flexible enough for the chaos of a busy service.
14 Aug 2022
6 min
Feature: automagic menu translation
Translating a menu by hand is tedious. From today, getting started — or adding a new language — is a single click. Under the hood, it is machine translation, so verify with a native speaker before going live.
23 Jul 2022
6 min
Feature: translated kitchen tickets
The same translation engine that helps customers read your menu can also print kitchen tickets in the language your chefs speak. Fewer mistakes on the line, happier staff.
23 Feb 2022
6 min
Feature: translated menus
Maintain a single menu across every language your customers speak. Prices, photos, and descriptions stay in sync automatically, and ORDR shows each customer the right menu based on their device language.
✻ A standing arrangement
New stories, posted to your inbox.
A short note from the editor when something is published — usually once a fortnight. No tracking pixels. Unsubscribe at the foot of every issue.