It all started when I gave birth to my beautiful girl 20 years ago. When I saw her for the first time, I promised myself that I would provide her with my own homemade food, showered with endless love.

I started to take cooking lessons (with many personal trials and errors) to provide my family members with special homemade dishes. At first, I was happy, but I soon started to get tired of my daily chores as I was a professional IT worker with very busy working days. Waking up early and not sleeping until midnight was exhausting and I started to feed my girls with frozen and unhealthy food. I was concerned about that and determined not to give up. With self-research and taking cooking lessons in my spare time, I finally found the best solution to provide my family with healthy but simple food… Meal Prep. With this style, the dishes that I made lasted for 3 days to 1 week in the fridge. It was a bit tricky to preserve the meals but I was happy and satisfied that I’d finally learned something new and simple to occupy my family's needs at home, at school, and at work.

I decided to quit my job and focus on my 12 and 8-year-old daughters (now 20 and 16!). Some of my friends asked me about the dishes that I made and told me they missed my delicious food. Because of that, I brought them homemade creations for their lunches for free. I didn’t have any experience in selling food and starting a simple culinary business at home, even though my colleagues insisted I start my own business. Instead, I opened my first cooking class for my colleagues because my passion is teaching and sharing simple and valuable lessons with others.

My cooking class grew perfectly. It was surreal but exciting to have opportunities to teach people besides my colleagues, from other working moms to some homeless people. I was really happy and grateful for that opportunity. One of the best things that happened was when somebody on Cookpad reached out and asked me to be one of Masak Bareng’s mentors. Masak Bareng is a community of Cookpad authors sharing extra knowledge on cooking and baking for beginners. I wasn’t that confident at first because I didn’t have a professional background in cooking, but when I met Kristina it all changed and I gained the confidence to teach and share things with others. I started to teach some lessons and write my first recipe on Cookpad, now I have over 500 recipes on my account. Being a mentor for others is my true passion and seeing other people grow is my true happiness. I created a community called Bakuliner, where people could come together to sell simple dishes. I was so happy that some of my recipes were used by community members to help them to start their own small businesses. I realized that my small actions were making a big impact on others. They could make supplemental income from my recipes and I didn’t charge them. I gave it all for free because that is one of my purposes in life, to share and give.

I finally joined Yeah! Meshi, thank you Soetrisno for making this happen! Being a part of Yeah! Meshi is one of the best opportunities in my life because I can continue my passion to share and have a big impact on others through cooking. I can help homecooks earn supplemental income through their homemade dishes and share some of my experiences in cooking so they can scale up and be better cooks for their family and others. I hope, with Yeah! Meshi running and growing, that together we can improve our homecooks and we can make children in Indonesia happier because of our healthy, homemade dishes that are made with love.

Share and Give Through Cooking was originally published in Yeah! Meshi Journey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Pure joy. Ecstatic. The only words that could describe my feelings when my children were born. I’ve always been so grateful for how everything that has been given to me is perfect in my eyes.

Including you, my child.

Although you’re different to your siblings. Although you might not speak or act the same as them, you’re way beyond perfection to me.

Hi, my name is Rosmalina Bachry, but you can call me Lina.

When my second son was born, I knew there was something special about him. God has entrusted me to learn one thing that I’ve been struggling with, acceptance.

My son was born with special needs. Rather than questioning why this happened to my family, I accepted and learned.

I’ve learned so much through my child’s development, and I always make sure that he doesn’t feel different from other kids. However, kids with special needs certainly have their own boundaries, especially with food. Children are great imitators, they often want to play, learn, and even eat the same things with other kids. I was determined to help my son grow without feeling that he is different. I didn’t want him to wonder why he couldn’t eat the same as his siblings did. Hence, my cooking journey started.

I looked into many sources, I travelled and asked many experts about food for children with special needs. I came to realise that we are what we eat. So I started to pay more attention to what my kids were eating each day. I learned how to process natural sources like sugar cane to replace refined sugar, to use natural Himalayan salt and avoid any artificial additives. I wanted my kids to eat delicious food with healthy ingredients and for them to start taking care of their bodies and understand how precious they are.

I’ll be honest, this mother-ing never-ending journey is both a challenge and an adventure. I get exhausted and frustrated sometimes, but I know we all do. Raising kids with special needs is not an easy task. There’s no easy way to do this. As their parents, we need to prepare more; higher school fees, a specialist nanny, more meds. The daily schedule is complex, especially for a working mom.

I am keen to support other parents through my meal prep cooking for Yeah! Meshi. I hope to make their lives just a tiny bit easier, knowing that all their kids are eating well every single day. My wish is for the families who order my meal prep to feel the same happiness as I do with my children, safe in the knowledge that they are eating the very best delicious, healthy food.

Because as moms, despite our different backgrounds and situations, we’re still the same. Our light of hope is when we see those big smiles appear on our kid’s faces and hear, “thank you, mom. I love you.”

You can see my meal prep cooking for Yeah! Meshi at https://order.yeahmeshi.com/menu/143

Stories From Our Homecooks — Lina’s Happiness Project was originally published in Yeah! Meshi Journey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last March marked my first home cook visit as part of the Yeah! Meshi onboarding process. This event would be my first step to understanding Yeah! Meshi’s main mission: to create supplemental income for passionate home cooks through cooking. Through Yeah! Meshi’s team of homecooks, the platform aims to help provide food for thousands of busy families daily. For my first visit, I went to South Jakarta to see Shinta, one of our passionate homecooks with 2 beautiful kids.

When I arrived at the house, I was welcomed by Shinta, her two kids, and her mom, while her husband was at work. I felt the warmth of a small and happy family home. I talked a lot with Shinta and her mother as they busily prepared their orders from Yeah! Meshi and Corporate Catering, since we all share a love of food. Interestingly, Shinta’s mother started her own small culinary business in Jakarta in the 2000s, providing lunches for several companies around their location. Shinta loves cooking Javanese food because she wants to preserve her strong family traditions and it reminds her of her hometown, Temanggung, Central Java. Also, I got a chance to play with Shinta’s children, they were so active and playful at home!

Yeah! Meshi as an outlet for Creativity

Shinta started to cook as a ‘sous chef’ for her mother’s small business. With basic techniques and recipes learned from her mother, she started to create and reinvent some of her mother’s recipes, finding her signature style of cooking. At first, Shinta felt insecure about her recipes and was afraid that her dishes wouldn’t be acceptable for her future customers. Then, she started to build a small scale business by providing some of her neighbors with her dishes. Since some of her neighbors are families with picky eater kids, she started to learn and collaborate with her mother to provide suitable dishes (Non-MSG, kids friendly menus with some variations like soups, beef patty) for these families. With great reviews and repeat orders coming from her customers, she felt a bit confident and ready to expand her business. After joining Yeah! Meshi, Shinta acquired a wide variety of customers with different preferences and tastes. With that kind of situation and frequent feedback from her customers, she gained confidence and got motivated to improve her cooking. She made some adjustments on her menu based on customers’ feedback in quantity and type of dishes to satisfy them without losing her own identity. Also, she created new variations of dishes for her customers, along with improving her food quality, to provide busy families with her delicious, healthy dishes. Yeah! Meshi has provided Shinta with the perfect opportunity to boost her confidence and creativity and to improve her skills. Shinta now offers 7 menus to Yeah! Meshi customers. Two of these were launched 2 weeks ago; Empal Gentong and Bandeng Presto. Empal Gentong is a traditional dish from Cirebon, a small city located 300 km away from Jakarta, famous for its signature soupy broth mixed with tender beef. Bandeng Presto is a pressure-cooked Milkfish with signature spices to enrich the flavor. This dish is very popular in Central Java and recommended for meal prep because Bandeng Presto can be kept in the fridge for up to 3 days and in the freezer for 2 weeks! In this Ramadan occasion, she customized her signature Bandeng Presto into beautiful Ramadan Hampers for her customers’ gifts.

Yeah! Meshi in the Future

It’s been a year since we started Yeah! Meshi with our mission to improve homecook’s supplemental income from their true passion. In our current dynamic external environment, we have 26 homecooks on board and they are continuing to grow. With this growth, and the inspirational stories behind each of our homecooks on their Yeah! Meshi journey, I hope Yeah! Meshi will become a bigger outlet for home cooks in Indonesia to grow, boost their confidence and creativity, and make their cooking journey a priceless lifetime experience!

Stories Behind our Homecooks — Finding Creativity through Cooking for Others was originally published in Yeah! Meshi Journey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

William Wongso, Indonesian culinary maestro and world-renowned chef, works in various fields to spread Indonesia’s traditional culinary culture to the world. William spared time to give us advice during his busy schedule amid his business trip to Europe. William listened intently and said, “you should do Rendang training.”

The world’s best food

Rendang is a traditional Indonesian cuisine, originating from Padang, West Sumatra, but is now popular throughout the country due to Padang eateries spread across the archipelago. Commonly known as West Sumatra Caramelised Beef Curry, Rendang is usually made by mixing beef with coconut cream and a base spice mix of red chillies, shallots, garlic, ginger, galangal, candlenut, turmeric, and dried spices, along with aromatic lemongrass, kaffir lime and turmeric leaves. It is then cooked for about 4 hours over a fire where it slowly caramelises until almost black. In 2017, CNN announced Rendang as ‘the world’s best food’. William said that mastering Rendang would definitely help improve one’s cooking skills and there’s no better way to learn than trying it myself. I had never cooked Indonesian food before so decided to ask the legend William to teach me. Here’s what happened next…

Cooking masterclass, the secret of a perfect Rendang

On the day of special training, William’s secret Rendang recipe turned out to be surprisingly simple. “ First, it’s important to know the taste of authentic Padang.” I tasted the Rendang sample prepared by William, and savoured the gentle sweetness combined with the rich and complex spice aroma. What was this? My view of Rendang collapsed at once! According to the recipe, no sugar was used. William explained that this sweetness is a natural sweetness from ripe coconut cream that can only be created by perfect caramelisation and to achieve this ‘perfect caramelisation’ you must, for example, choose coconut cream with the right fat content at 23–24 percent. Even the same ingredients can vary greatly in taste, aroma, moisture content, and fat content. A careful approach to every ingredient is the first step to successful Rendang. ‘Know the difference,’ I wrote down in my notebook.

After putting the prepared ingredients into the pan, I churned the pan in the hot air for hours. From the simmering pot, magma like Rendang paste splattered on my arms and face. Painful! But if I stopped to wipe it off, the bottom of the pan would scorch, so I had to keep going. As the moisture evaporated and the oil started to emerge, the paste became heavier. Still, I couldn’t stop stirring! This method of slow cooking is the very meaning of the word ‘Rendang’ (or locally ‘Randang’ — the Western Sumatran verb ‘merandang’ refers to putting ingredients in a low-heated pot and stirring the meat continuously until the water evaporates and the meat is cooked tenderly). Only after getting past this struggle, do you reach the Rendang cooking process’s epic highlight — caramelisation.

My Rendang finally reached caramelisation after 4 hours of churning. As I removed the pan from the fire, happily serving my first-ever homemade Rendang on a plate, William told me; “Now you know the basics. Congratulations on reaching the starting point. Now, you just have to practice again and again!” The road to becoming a Rendang Master has opened… ‘Repeat for mastery’ I hastily scribbled on the edge of my Rendang paste splattered page.

The National Rendang Competition

Shortly after, William invited me to join him in Rendang’s sacred land, Padang, West Sumatra. William was invited to serve as a judge for the National Rendang Competition, where teams from the 33 other states across Indonesia gather to compete in Rendang cooking. As a member of his team, I had the privilege of observing the unique and evolving techniques of Rendang making from different parts of Indonesia and had the opportunity to taste the 30+ unique Rendang dishes. While caramelisation is still at the heart of Rendang’s success, the mix of spices varies greatly from region to region and is so diverse that it was like sampling different dishes. In another part of the venue, there was a competition in which local Padang school children participated. Born and raised in the Rendang culture, they were “merandang” effortlessly with cool faces, and the quality of their finished Rendang was high enough to impress the judges.

The birthplace of Rendang

We then travelled to Payakumbuh, the second largest city in West Sumatra and the birthplace of Rendang. Payakumbuh is actively investing in growing the small and medium, home-made Rendang business industry. I was gifted a lot of Rendang, proudly made by local entrepreneurs. In Payakumbuh I learned that Rendang is made with a wide variety of ingredients, from vegetarian Rendang with mushrooms to egg Rendang — such a diverse dish!

Advice from the master, William Wongso

On our way back from West Sumatra, William said. “Cooking is a discipline. First, you learn the real, authentic stuff and pay respect to it. Understand the basic ‘forms’ and ‘techniques’ thoroughly. Then, find the way that works for you; add ingredients, change the amounts, arrange it, and then, after repeated exploration and practice, you will finally create your own style for the first time. If you don’t know the real thing, the quest won’t start, just like you can’t make modern Indonesian cuisine without understanding traditional cuisine first.” It was a fresh surprise to hear from the Indonesian culinary legend a similar idea to “Shuhari” of Japanese martial arts and it resonated with my heart.

Originally published at https://medium.com on February 3, 2020.

Rendang, my road to cooking mastery was originally published in Yeah! Meshi Journey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi, I’m Kaho, a designer from Cookpad and I’m currently working in the Yeah! Meshi team. This article is about a motivational program that the team and I designed for our homecooks.

A little bit about Yeah! Meshi

The Yeah! Meshi project was created to benefit homecooks and busy families in Jakarta. A team of homecooks sell their nutritious, pre-prepared meals to busy families, resulting in happier, healthier lives all round. We wanted to create a way for talented homecooks to generate supplemental income, but more importantly, give them opportunities to improve their expertise and keep learning.

We have an exceedingly talented team of homecooks, all with a varied range of skills and different reasons for working in the team. We wanted to come up with an idea to help keep them motivated and hungry to learn more.

We decided to develop a program to do just this, and it all came about from a design SPRINT we held in October 2019…

What is a SPRINT?

Essentially, a SPRINT is a short, intensely focused process where a small, diverse team work together to solve business problems over a maximum of 5 days. In a nutshell, a focus is chosen, ideas are sketched out by each team member, a prototype is built and tested by experts and often, a successful product is launched at the end! It’s super effective and it’s how our teams work to solve challenges at Cookpad.

The initial challenges…

Like every great project, we were presented with a few challenges at the start:

1. The on-boarding process for homecooks was proving tricky because of different cooking skills.
2. People had various motivations for becoming Yeah! Meshi homecooks.
3. The process of searching for and finding cooks whose qualities were high enough to be Yeah! Meshi homecooks was extremely challenging.

We decided to hold a 3 day SPRINT to come up with a solution for solving these issues.

The Focus

How might we motivate homecooks to continue growing and learning new skills with Yeah! Meshi?

Over the 3 days, our focus shifted from on-boarding to supporting the continuous growth of homecooks. We decided that just changing the on-boarding process wouldn’t make a big enough impact on the homecooks, so we agreed to design something to encourage them over the long-term.

From the SPRINT, we developed the ‘Apron Development Program’.

The Apron Development Program was created to inspire every homecook to learn more and improve their business through making small, regular changes. The program supports their continuous learning and development, enabling them to become a “better cook than yesterday”, the Yeah! Meshi promise

So, what is the Apron Development Program?

The Apron Development Program is a motivational improvement path, delivered by Yeah! Meshi, dedicated to homecooks with a strong appetite for continuous learning and progression.

When homecooks are recruited by Yeah! Meshi, they are gifted an original apron with a catalogue of badges. Each badge is linked to a particular skill, learning and experience and can be collected as they reach their goals. By wearing the aprons, homecooks are reminded of their commitment to continuous improvement as selected members of the Yeah! Meshi team.

The design evolution of the Apron Development Program

When I started this project, I did some quick research around popular games and how they fired up their users. I wanted to make the reward program as enjoyable as possible so homecooks would be having fun and improving their skills at the same time.

The initial directions of the design were inspired by Pokemon and Dota 2.

The Pokemon-inspired idea was to give home cooks the freedom to develop their own skills. Pokemon gamers have huge freedom around which monsters they can collect in order to assemble their own team. Also, it brings them joy by collecting many different kinds of monsters. From that system, I came up with the idea around the collections of different badges; each category represents different key moments: Journey, Variety, Spike, Community and Achievements.

The second idea, inspired by Dota 2, was to give home cooks a clear path to becoming an ideal Yeah! Meshi homecook. With this idea, homecooks had specific assignments to complete before moving on to the next level. Homecooks started with yellow aprons and gained small badges to show their achievement level as they progressed (this system is also used in other organisations such as the army and scouting).

The final look of the Apron Development Program

We decided to go with the ‘Pokemon’ idea, allowing homecooks to have more freedom with their skill developments.

We wanted the homecooks to feel proud about wearing their aprons and being part of the Yeah! Meshi community every time they create a meal prep for customers. There is a small embroidery on every apron which reads ‘tambah harl, tambah mahir’ in Bahasa Indonesian(better cook than yesterday).

Launching the Apron Development Program

In January 2020, we had our very first homecook meetup in Jakarta. More than 20 homecooks came to the office and we were really excited to launch the Apron Development Program by handing them each an original apron, badges for their individual achievements and a catalogue to highlight what kind of badges would be collectable in the future.

We are hoping the Apron Development Program will evolve in the future to include even more exciting features to attract more homecooks to Yeah! Meshi and continue to motivate our current team.

I’ve really enjoyed being involved in the Apron Development Program; from the initial SPRINT and designing the badges, to the launch in Jakarta. Seeing what it meant to the homecooks to receive their aprons has really inspired me to develop new ideas for the program… watch this space!

The Apron Program, a SPRINT and a success was originally published in Yeah! Meshi Journey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On December 19, Yeah! Meshi were proud to announce the relocation to a new office, one of the highlights from a hugely eventful year! We invited our colleagues from Cookpad Indonesia and one of our first homecooks to join us and celebrate with prayer and meals. We served dishes ordered from our homecooks for the banquets, ranging from tumpeng rice with ayam rica-rica (a speciality, spicy chicken dish with plenty of chillies) and sauteed papaya flowers to gudeg from Magelang (a traditional dish of unripe jack fruit stewed with palm sugar and coconut milk).

The room was filled with smiles and laughter and everyone enjoyed the delicious food while chatting and looking back on what we’ve accomplished during the past year. There was a warm family atmosphere from everyone present, especially from our guest homecook, Fitri. With sparkling eyes and a smile, Fitri told us about her experiences as a Yeah! Meshi homecook:

“Starting with my hobbies and love for cooking, I was able to reach this stage and join Yeah! Meshi, becoming one of the early homecooks. Although sometimes accompanied by tears and disappointment, it is nothing compared to the happiness and pride that I feel. Hopefully I can continue to improve my cooking skills on my Yeah! Meshi adventure.”

The relocation

In the middle of last year, the Yeah! Meshi team began to think about moving to a new office that could accommodate more staff and enable them to work more creatively and effectively.

Last year, our team of 7 occupied a two-story office with a shared space on the first floor and a workspace and kitchen on the second floor. The biggest difficulty we had was establishing communication between teams when spread across two floors. We often had to go up and down stairs many times just to ask questions or to have a discussion, good for our legs but not very practical! The absence of a meeting room also made it difficult for us to have brainstorming sessions or hold video calls, not to mention the busy roadside location of the office with constant interruption from noisy traffic.

Choosing a new office is never easy, there are many things to consider in terms of location, ease of access, the amount of office space and of course how we could create a better atmosphere for everyone. One thing we knew for sure, a spacious kitchen for sampling menus and a large shared room that could accommodate dozens of people for events were the most important factors in choosing our new space.

After visiting several prospective places, we decided on one of the houses located in the Kemang area, one of the most charming and vibrant neighborhoods in South Jakarta and close to the Golden Triangle. The new office is a two-story building with bright white walls, well away from the traffic. There are 6 rooms, all large enough for working space for a growing team, meetings and video calls, a spacious room for community events and a large kitchen. The office is also equipped with a backyard that is large enough for us to experiment with syneco-farming*, enabling us to grow our own ingredients for cooking purposes.

*Syneco farming is a farming method that embraces extreme biodiversity by growing a high variety of crops on just one plot of land. Cookpad’s Farm45 project is helping to establish Syneco farms across the world.

A new chapter

We have been experimenting a lot over the past year, not everything has given us good results but we are learning from our failures. In 2019, our team of 31 homecooks delivered 1,507 portions to 116 happy customers, this is a huge achievement and marks the start of a promising future for Yeah! Meshi and our growing team of homecooks.

Today in our Kemang office, we begin a new chapter and our second year of Yeah! Meshi. We believe cooking has more value than ever today. By providing business opportunities for skilled cooks across Indonesia, we are helping to benefit homecooks and the busy families who order from them. We know that home-cooked meals are a healthier option than ‘ready-made’, instant meals and our homecooks are committed to honing their skills and providing families with easy access to a variety of the highest quality, nutritious dishes.

We begin the new year with renewed enthusiasm to meet our goals, working towards a happier, healthier Indonesia. We can’t wait to see what 2020 will hold for Yeah! Meshi, join us as we continue our journey.

Yeah! Meshi move to a new office! was originally published in Yeah! Meshi Journey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a skunkworks team, being able to iterate fast is paramount to Team Yeah! Meshi. To achieve this goal, our whole tech stack needs to be optimised, from the way we divide work, to the technologies we use, even to how we deploy. At the same time, we cannot sacrifice code quality- so it is a constant delicate balance between Good and Fast in the project management triangle.

How do we do it?

Well, our story starts with Flutter.

The Hood

For those of you who don’t know what Flutter is, here is the official summary:

Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.

Why did we choose Flutter? This can be a separate article by itself, however I can summarise it in 3 points:

1. You write your app once and build it for both Android and iOS. Now I know what this sounds like, but it actually works. Flutter is like a game engine in the sense that all Flutter applications are just the Flutter Engine that you “script” by writing Dart code. That means that your apps run 60 FPS on the GPU with native performance.
2. The UI is written right in your Dart code- there is no separate layout file. This, coupled with the magic of hot reload makes app prototyping a breeze.. Once you get used to it. There is a steep learning curve, especially if you come from the harsh lands of Android or iOS development.
3. Flutter for Web. Currently in beta, this feature allows you to build your Flutter code for web as well. This is especially valuable to us, since in Indonesia, our main market, phones have such low storage space that people don’t want to download apps unless they really have to.

Similar to India, Indonesia suffers from poor infrastructure. While mobile data is relatively cheap, bandwidth is poor: average mobile download speed is about 10 mbps, less than half of the global average. And while smartphone use keeps increasing, relatively cheap phones don’t have much data storage, which makes users picky about which apps they use regularly.

Almost one year later, I can say without hesitation that we made the right choice with Flutter.

The Engine

What about our backend? Our main web service is written in Python 3 with Django while our API is written using Django Rest Framework. We use PostgreSQL as our database.

When we first started, we used Firestore as our database, and we did not have an API- the mobile app connected straight to Firestore. This had the advantage of being fast to develop since we did not have a web service to deal with. However, this approach proved to be unsuitable for anything more complex than prototype, for these reasons:

1. Since it is a NoSQL database, Firestore does not support complex queries. You can structure your documents to mimic a relational database, but you will not able to do deep queries.
2. There is no guarantee of data integrity. For example, if you have an Employee document with the field name, that field can be a string, it can be a number, it might be empty or it may not even exist. You do not know until you actually access the value, whereas with a RDMS like PostgreSQL, you know for a fact that your name field is a non-nullable string.
3. It is difficult to explore your data. With a RDMS, you can just plug in something like Tableu and you are good to go. You can even use Excel (if you are so inclined).
4. With a web service, your app does not have to bother with retrieving the data- it just requests data from an endpoint and displays it in a nice way. You can move all your business logic to your web service, which is where it belongs. In the future, if you create another client for another platform, all it has to do is consume the API.

We tried out many languages and frameworks, including Go and Elixir (with Phoenix, which I love), but eventually, we decided on Django because one of the unnegotiable requirements was to have an admin panel where the local team can do data entry. We have a great team in Indonesia, so it is very important they have an admin panel that is easy to use. With Django, it is very easy to create an admin panel- you define your models and Django takes care of the rest. Dress it up with Django Jet and you have a great looking admin panel.

The Assembly Line

So now we have to deploy this monster. All our API’s, databases and admin panels are hosted on DigitalOcean. Our master branch is always ready for production. Whenever we have a release, we tag the associated commit with the release number. Theoretically, we can add a build step to the end of our CI/CD pipeline, but we prefer to deploy manually — deploying is easy as choosing a release tag and running our Ansible script. The deployment script pulls the associated release from our source control, handles all the migrations and restarts all the services. It also sends Slack notifications when the deployment succeeds or fails.

Deployment is pretty fast- on average, we deploy around 3 new releases a day, with minimal downtime.

The Milage Service

Now that we have deployed, it’s time to monitor the results. One of the most valuable tools we use is Sentry. Sentry is an error monitoring tool that catches all the errors in your running applications and displays them in a user friendly fashion. You can also create GitHub issues for errors and auto assign them to your developers. It has support for both Django and Flutter- so it is a perfect fit for us. I cannot tell you how many bugs Sentry caught for us.

All our other monitoring, like CPU usage, RAM usage, bandwidth usage and so forth are done through builtin DigitalOcean agents. These come out of the box- you can have DigitalOcean send you an email or a Slack notification too, which is very useful.

The Garage

All our code is hosted on GitHub, so it makes sense to use GitHub for issue tracking as well. Each project has its own Kanban board. If a planned feature is too big, then it can have its own Kanban board.

Each issue has one branch associated with it. Any non-trivial work needs to start as an issue, especially for features. This might feel cumbersome at first, however, it is worth it just to have a solid historical record of why you created that feature or fixed this bug. Issues also allow for extended discussions, which you cannot have on a branch.

As for our branching model, we use GitHub Flow with squash merges. To summarise, it goes like this:

1. The developer branches off master.
2. The work is done on the branch. When it’s done, the developer squashes their commits.
3. The developer creates a pull request.
4. The pull request is reviewed, and if everything is okay (and if it passes our Codacy checks) the PR is merged.

Before GitHub Flow, we used Git Flow. Git Flow is great; but there are two downsides to it:

1. Since we only support one incremental release at a time, release branches are unnecessary and cumbersome; tagging master is good enough.
2. The addition of the develop branch (rather than having just master) adds complexity without any upside. It’s just two branches you have to keep in sync, which can (and eventually will) become a problem.

GitHub Flow is a good fit for teams that iterate fast — it is also very simple to understand for new developers.

For commit messages, we enforce the Conventional Commits standard. We add Closes #X (X being the issue number) to the end of the commit message which automatically closes the related issue in GitHub.

For years, I used git through a terminal, until I tried GitKraken two years ago- now I cannot go back. GitKraken is awesome. Of course, all developers are free to use whatever git tool they want, provided they abide by our commit & branching standards.

There you have it; our whole tech stack here in Team Yeah! Meshi. We are always improving every small aspect of it. If you have read this far (and like what you’ve been reading)- we are always looking for talented developers to join our team. Just apply at our workable page.

Happy coding!

Our Tech Stack for Yeah! Meshi was originally published in Yeah! Meshi Journey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Working Mom vs. Stay at Home Mom: We Both Struggle.

I’ve felt the struggle of being a working mom. We go to work early, and come back home when it’s already dark. I’m lucky enough to still have the opportunity to play and have conversations with my three sons in the morning and arrive home when they’re still up. I can often cook their favourite meal and have a great laugh with them at the dinner table. I’m in control of what goes in their school lunch boxes so can feel at ease knowing that they are getting the nutrition they need. In reality, not all moms have that kind of privilege.

On the other hand, stay at home moms have their own struggles. People might think that SAHMs (stay at home moms) have a “better life” because they stay at home and take care of the children. That they don’t have to worry about working or having a stable paycheck. Certainly, it’s not true for most cases.

Working in the Yeah! Meshi team means I’ve spoken to many women who have worked and stayed at home and I’m very certain that all of us struggle in our own way. And how can we help a little of their struggles and burdens, like food part for busy mothers and add income for home cooks through Yeah! Meshi?

Supporting Each Other Through Technology.

We’re now in the era of modern technology. From quick food delivery and fast food outlets to online apps, technology has enabled us to have an easier and more ‘instant’ life — but this is the tricky part, we are attracted to things that are fast. Sometimes we don’t pay attention to how greasy the fast food is, what kind of ingredients are inside or how the food is cooked. We just know that it’s delicious and quick.

Through Yeah! Meshi, I’ve witnessed the beauty of the support from one mom to another. It really gives a real meaning of “moms sticking together”. The basic concept of Yeah! Meshi is to support the busy (or working) moms by providing home-cooked meal-prep from experienced cooks, every week. With Yeah! Meshi, we’re hoping that busy families could feel less stress in thinking about how they could make sure their children are eating well. They could also avoid their children ordering in (which most of the time is fast food).

Not only do I see the happiness from the working mom’s side, I also see the confidence from our home cooks since they started to cook for Yeah! Meshi. Our home cooks are mostly SAHMs who were trying to find an alternative source of income. With Yeah! Meshi, they are supporting each other. The working moms now have easy and credible access to a great family meal-prep, while the SAHMs have an income through their cooking.

This kind of amazingness really motivates me to wake up in the morning and look forward to what kind of happiness Yeah! Meshi will bring. As part of the team, I listen to our home cook’s and customers’ stories almost every single day. Our home cooks and customers consist of moms who have their own struggles and backgrounds. I’m just incredibly grateful that we can utilize today’s technology to support them in their daily lives.

The Future of Yeah! Meshi.

If you’re a parent, you’ll know how complex it is to ‘nail’ the role. As parents, we all have many clouds of feelings that we need to manage.

I’ve learned so much about how important it is to support each other, and I’m sure that it’s endless learning. I believe that Yeah! Meshi will bring more innovations for busy families, so we can continue to support each other through food, and through technology.

From one mom to another,

It’s Yeah! Meshi.

Yeah! Meshi From Mother Side was originally published in Yeah! Meshi Journey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Luckily, Nina has found a solution. Once a week, she has a meal-prep package delivered by a local, accomplished homecook called Sonya, through the Yeah! Meshi platform. Sonya is a great help for busy moms like Nina. Sonya supplies the main dish, and Nina prepares some rice, heats the meal prep, serves, and the dinner is ready. Compared to catering and on-demand food delivery, this is as convenient, but much healthier for her growing children. Her guilt is somewhat alleviated.

Similar to Nina, Sonya is also a mother. As is common in Jakarta, she gave up her career when she got married so she could concentrate on caring for her children and family. Cooking for mothers like Nina through Yeah! Meshi offers her a way to get back into work, and begin earning money again.

Each Tuesday she’ll wake early to prepare the meals her customers have ordered. The day before, Sonya will have checked the Yeah! Meshi app to see how many orders she has received and what ingredients she will need to purchase, heading to the market in the afternoon to collect them fresh from her trusted sources.

Working diligently, by around midday she has successfully cooked all the order and handed them to delivery bikes.

When she first joined Yeah! Meshi it was not easy for her to cook many different orders at the same time; however, she is happy to realise she is now better at time management and feels of sense of achievement and development in her cooking.

Customer’s positive feedback provides her with a great reward, which she loves. However, she has one more substantial reward. She cooks the same menu for her family, and her kids love Tuesday’s dinner especially.

“Mom, I love your food. I tell my friends every Tuesday is like a buffet and I feel like in a party.” Sonya smiles.

And the money helps, too. She recently upgraded her phone from old Android to a new iPhone with the money she earns.

Yeah! Meshi is aiming to create supplemental income for more than ten-thousand passionate homecooks, by supporting them in what they already love doing — cooking. Through this, we want to solve the food-issues of thousands of Moms across Jakarta. For us, enabling Moms to help and support other Moms through food is a beautiful partnership that we can help to foster.

Our operational model is designed with homecooks commitments and capabilities in mind — homecooks cook meals once a week, and their customers are limited to ensure they can keep up with demand. This helps busy mothers too — they don’t need to order food every day, saving time and mental exertion.

We believe that the number of home cooks will increase if we can successfully create a platform in which daily cooking generates supplemental income. This is Cookpad mission.

Enablers such as the internet, frictionless payment or on-demand delivery services are all available, and now the challenge is to design a solution well enough to make this behaviour change. There are several home-cooked meal delivery services in the world already, many of which we have carefully analysed. Our continuous dedication to experimenting and learning from failure has resulted in a good formula and solution for operations that make unit-economic sense, keeping higher margins for cooks than working at average restaurants. (continues…)

Originally published at https://medium.com on November 27, 2019. Click the link to continue reading.

Creating a platform where homecooks empowered by solving busy mom’s problem was originally published in Yeah! Meshi Journey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Yeah! Meshi Brand

The team wanted a re-brand of the initial design, they needed visuals that would better represent their vision and be instantly appealing to customers. When I got the brief, my initial thought was, “how do I make the new visuals more familiar and authentic to people in Indonesia?”.

Design Process

Phase 1 : Interview
My design process starts with an interview of the team to gather as much information as possible about what they are trying to achieve.
For Yeah! Meshi, I needed to find out what kind of service was being offered, who the customers were, the key messaging and what we needed to communicate. The stronger the ideas and the more knowledge around service I have, the easier for me to translate and create the visual language.

Phase 2 : Research and Mood board
I’ll then start researching images based on the ideas, concepts and keywords gathered from the interview and put them together on a mood board. Usually, 2–3 different visual languages could be communicated.
For Yeah! Meshi, I created 3 mood boards for key themes and showed to the team. One was dropped, so I developed the initial designs from 2 themes: Fresh and Caring.

Direction 1 : Fresh
I chose one colour for the logo to keep it simple, with no added extras, to create a style that communicates quality and no added chemicals. It’s really important that customers know the food they are buying is safe to eat!

Direction 2 : Caring
I wanted to illustrate the superior quality of the food, as well as touching on the emotional advantages of buying meals prepared by our home cooks. I also wanted to highlight the beauty of imperfection as this food is real and not manufactured to a specific template by illustration. I chose a more vivid colour palette for this theme, with chilli red and warm orange which are inspired by Indonesian foods.

Phase 3 : Feedback and Update
The Yeah! Meshi team liked both directions so I decided to combine them. This lead to the final branding of Yeah! Meshi. I drew new illustrations that more accurately represented Indonesian foods and combined them with the simple, Y!M logo mark.

Thoughts behind the new Yeah! Meshi Branding

Logo mark
The previous logo included a female face and I didn’t want to eliminate the connection from the old to new branding. What I wanted to create was a gender neutral logo with a connection to the previous Yeah! Meshi branding, so I combined the Y, ! and M symbols to make a face. The face represents the human side of the business and helps to emphasise that it’s made by a person.

Illustration and Colours
I wanted to convey the warmth and dedication behind foods from our home cooks to customers. I decided to draw an illustration with imperfect lines, splashes of colour and abstract shapes. I chose a fresh green base colour for the designs to represent a leaf (which many Indonesian dishes are presented on) and abstract shapes to represent the different, familiar Indonesian foods.

Typography
Because the logo and illustrations are communicating strong messages, I chose to use the ‘Neue Haas Grotesk’ font as our primary and secondary typeface. ‘Neue Haas Grotesk’ is a beautifully crafted typeface by Christian Schwartz, Max Miedinger and published by Linotype. Its simple, yet highly legible and bold typeface, balances out the strong illustrations with multiple colours.

Expanding the new brand into Yeah! Meshi’s communication materials

Home cooks upload weekly menus for their customers on Instagram so I needed to adapt the new Yeah! Meshi visual languages for the menus, as well as design the packaging for the meals. Yeah! Meshi needs many different kinds of communication materials to promote the service and tell the messages.

Personal thoughts on Yeah! Meshi rebranding

As a non Indonesian designer designing for a service in Jakarta, I wanted the new branding to be as authentic and familiar as possible. I believe in any format of design, all designers have a strong responsibility to come up with something original, appropriate and authentic for the target audience.

I wanted to convey the warmth and human touch behind Yeah! Meshi through my designs. To show that it is about caring for your family, that kids love it and that it’s a really healthy option. I wanted to reassure busy families that it’s ok to cook and serve these nutritious, pre-prepared meals. I also wanted to communicate that the food is kid-friendly, that’s why there are happy faces on the designs. They are more recognisable than some of the other abstract shapes in the illustration. The energy from the food and from our home cooks is highlighted through the colours and style. I hope Yeah! Meshi is helping to relieve some of the pressure and guilt that working parents feel, especially when they don’t have time to feed their families the kind of food they would like.

Yeah! Meshi, a design journey was originally published in Yeah! Meshi Journey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.