Asali Heritage Food Competition Platform
Asali is an African ancestry and heritage food competition that invites home cooks, keepers of tradition and a new generation of chefs to share the recipes and stories that define their communities. The platform was delivered by TalkuTalku Limited for Asali. I joined as a contract developer and was the sole engineer on the project, building the full system with Next.js and Prisma on PostgreSQL while working alongside TalkuTalku's in-house team. The public site presents the competition, its seven categories, participating countries, events and heritage in English, French and Arabic. Behind it sits a role-based application with separate dashboards for participants, judges, country leads, content directors and super admins, along with a heritage bank that preserves entries as a growing archive, and certificate issuance with public verification.
Full-Stack Engineer
2 weeks
TalkuTalku Limited (for Asali Limited)
The Challenge
Asali needed far more than a promotional website. The competition spans nine countries, seven categories and a mix of live events, and every group involved needs a different view of the same system: participants entering their dishes, judges evaluating them, country leads coordinating locally, content directors shaping what is published, and administrators overseeing everything. The audience speaks three languages, many entrants are first-time users, and the brand's emphasis on heritage meant the platform also had to preserve recipes and stories beyond a single competition cycle. All of this had to be designed, built and shipped by one engineer on a fixed timeline.
The Approach
I designed the data model in Prisma on PostgreSQL and built the application in Next.js with locale-aware routing for English, French and Arabic, including right-to-left support. Authentication and role-based access control give each user type its own dashboard and permissions, so judges, country leads, content directors, participants and super admins only see and do what their role requires. A heritage bank stores competition entries as a lasting archive of African food knowledge, and a certificate system issues recognition to participants with a verification flow that lets anyone confirm a certificate is genuine. A category finder helps entrants who are unsure where their dish belongs, and the public site carries the designer's illustrated, story-led visual language across every page.