Brix Pizza – A Demo App

Over the past several years, I worked in marketing and spent a lot of time trying to make technical demos more compelling. The goal was always to demonstrate a capability or product feature, but there’s no reason a demo can’t also be fun, memorable, and grounded in reality.

“Hello World” gets the job done, but it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t resemble how applications are actually built, deployed, or operated. And because of that, it’s easy to forget.

Even though I’m no longer in a marketing role, I still build labs, experiment with infrastructure, and give technical demos. I also now work for a company where open source is foundational, so I figured why not build one of these apps and let everyone use it.

Introducing Brix Pizza

So let me introduce you to Brix Pizza. This is a Golang web application that uses a MySQL database to store your pizza orders. It’s intentionally simple to use but realistic enough to be useful for real demos, labs, and personal experimentation. You can see a demo video below of the application in action, but I must warn you: This app might be controversial especially if you are working with a group of people who don’t agree on the best style of pizza! I will not be held responsible for any fights you have with co-workers when they don’t agree that Chicago Style Deep Dish is the best pizza to order from Brix Pizza.

Here is a short demo video of the app in use by a user.

Getting Started

If you’d like to use this demo application for your own purpose, feel free. Just know that this app was almost entirely created with AI by someone who spends most of their time working on Infrastructure stuff and not a developer. If you’re a programmer and want to make improvements to this code, here is the source code repository, feel free to fork it, branch it or submit a pull request. If you submit issues, I might also look into it further in my spare time, so don’t be shy.

The source code can be found on my github page: https://github.com/eshanks16/brix

If you have a Kubernetes cluster and don’t care about the source code, the repo also contains a deployment directory with Kubernetes YAML files to deploy both mysql and the brix web app. Just be sure to update your connection strings, and storage classes for your own environment.

Enjoy the app, and I would love to hear how you’ve used this app in your own demos or labs to make things more engaging. Have fun!