Project Summary
District Taco has over a dozen locations across the East Coast of the United States, with ambitious plans to expand across the country and franchise their brand.
To support their aggressive growth, the company needed to build reliable, enterprise-grade systems that were extensible and could be customized to meet stakeholder needs.
The Client
District Taco is a restaurant chain that serves fresh, healthy, and customizable Mexican food, Yucatan style. Founded by Mexican immigrant Osiris Hoil and his neighbor Marc Wallace in 2009, District Taco started as a food cart in Rosslyn, Virginia.
The Challenge
District Taco has always been a tech-savvy company. Unwilling to be tied to online ordering software that might limit their ability to meet customer expectations, they developed their own iOS/Android ordering app.
They built everything in-house for all their internal processes, too, such as onboarding a new employee, launching a merch shop, and processing catering and food orders.
But the developers who had initially built District Taco’s systems had not followed clean code practices. Their code was difficult to understand and hard to maintain. Over the years, the company became stuck with legacy code where even the most superficial change, such as setting up a new employee in the system, could take days.
District Taco wanted to move fast, but their codebase simply couldn’t follow their business priorities. They realized they needed to do something drastic. So they hired X-Team developers to untangle the mess they were in.
The Services
First, X-Teamers focused on speeding up District Taco’s deployments. They created automation pipelines within Google App Engine and conducted a thorough review of the codebase to identify and optimize essential code components within the legacy infrastructure.
Then X-Teamers implemented a version control system on GitHub. Previously, District Taco's team faced challenges locating essential code due to the lack of a centralized system, requiring their Director of Digital to retrieve code from a former developer’s laptop. X-Teamers invested time in transferring salvageable parts of the codebase to GitHub for better version control and created a custom documentation repository on GitBook to aid future engineers.
Third, the team developed new back-end APIs with FastAPI, a high-performance Python framework that improves the efficiency of writing and deploying code.
Finally, X-Teamers moved all back-end technologies to the cloud, eliminating the need to access specific hardware to retrieve important code files. They are also building infrastructure in Kubernetes, organizing repositories, and transitioning from GitHub Issues to Jira for better tracking and measurement.
Results
Increased Automation to Accelerate Operations
X-Team’s work on District Taco’s technology infrastructure has dramatically improved the company’s ability to operate efficiently and respond rapidly to changes. Previously, critical tasks were slowed down by a complex, outdated codebase that required manual intervention and time-consuming retrieval of code from various sources. Today, these processes are streamlined and automated, with all key technical metrics moving from days to mere hours, allowing District Taco to adapt more readily to business needs.
Centralized Code and Documentation
With centralized version control on GitHub and a robust documentation system on GitBook, District Taco’s technical foundation is now far more resilient. The challenges of locating and recovering essential code have been eliminated, and future engineers have clear documentation, significantly reducing onboarding time and minimizing the risk of knowledge loss over time.
Streamlined Operations in the Cloud for Franchise Support
By implementing cloud-based infrastructure, X-Team has freed District Taco from the limitations of physical hardware and location-specific data storage. The shift to the cloud ensures all components are accessible, interconnected, and secure, reinforcing the stability of District Taco’s operations.
This increased operational efficiency has opened new opportunities for growth. District Taco is now well-positioned as a franchisable brand, with the technical foundation to support franchise partners in replicating District Taco’s unique recipes, processes, and values. The company can share its systems and standards more easily, enabling new locations to adopt and maintain the same high-quality experience customers have come to expect.
