Sterling / Sendbot

2015 - 2016

In the summer of 2015, I was hired as a software engineering intern at a small startup called MenuMe. MenuMe was early in pushing for the transition of restaurants' menus from the common paper based format into a digital and image rich format enabling them to harness the new wave of digital ordering and delivery.

When I joined, they had partnered with over 500 of the top restaurants in the San Fransisco bay area to create high quality digital menus complete with high-res photos of every dish. This was years before the COVID 19 pandemic popularized QR code menus and was a huge improvement on Yelp's unreliable user-submitted food photos and dish reviews.

Through the summer, I became a vital member of the team and ultimately was offered a full-time position beyond the summer. I jumped at the opportunity to take a year off from my undergrad, get experience launching products, and help MenuMe unlock the new wave of digital ordering and delivery that was just beginning to take off.

I served as MenuMe's only product designer and front-end engineer and worked closely with the CEO, CTO, and product manager/director of photography.

We built an entire end-to-end delivery platform consisting of a consumer side app & platform, a runner/delivery app & platform, an in-restaurant kitchen app & platform, and a logistics and menu platform. During my time there, we launched a hotel based brand, called Sterling, which focused on reinventing room service by partnering with a select group of hotels and curated restaurants.

When I left MenuMe, the team was in the process of using the platforms and systems I helped develop to launch a robot delivery brand focused on combining the power of robotics and food delivery to solve last mile logistics. The resulting product was called Sendbot.

Hey, I'm Adler!

A full-stack software engineer, product designer, and artist.

I am passionate about crafting magical experiences around complex data, information, or sensory landscapes. I strive to lower the bar for non-technical people to succeed in utilizing technology for work, curiosity, and play. My work has manifested as artistic experiments, prototypes of devices and machines, software applications, and developer tools.

I co-founded and am the Head of Product at Comake, where we're working to improve interoperability and composability between software tools for productivity, data ownership, and enterprise intelligence. This work has centered around developing methods and abstractions for scalable software integration, data deduplication & correlation, and information retrieval.

When not designing or building digital systems and experiences, I love to run, cycle, hike, paint, sculpt, and sometimes build furniture.

adlerfaulkner@gmail.com • LinkedIn • Github