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Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?
When a group of developers start meeting regularly for lunch, it's almost inevitable for them to create an app -- within days -- to answer a real question: What the heck should we eat today?
This happened to me on more than one occasion. Here's an old one from where I worked at long time ago: http://www.venarc.com/lunch/
I'm curious to see what other startups/groups have come up with. List your startup and a link to the lunch picker (if it's public).
- hrayr 11y agoI'll get the ball rolling. Here's Venarc's lunch picker that's probably 7-8 years old. http://www.venarc.com/lunch/ http://www.venarc.com/lunch/
- DigitalSea 11y agoThe startup I contracted for didn't have an app. We would just take turns picking a place for everyone to eat at. One day I would pick a place, someone else would take us through some suspicious alley ways to a hidden Mexican place, etc.
- 100k 11y agoWe've used this one: http://wtfsigte.com/ http://wtfsigte.com/ Crude but effective.
- pawangupta11 11y agoWe experimented with a channel #Lunch on Slack, unfortunately it became a channel to share /giphy food
- edmack 11y ago/giphy food is my FAVORITE slack usage!
- jonbishop 11y agoWe have a bot in Slack that randomly picks places from a list of nearby restaurants.
- rtpg 11y agosame, the slackbot "random response" thing is a great 80% solution for so many things
- ohmyiv 11y agoMy last job (not a startup) used wheelof: http://wheelof.com/lunch/ http://wheelof.com/lunch/ Pretty cool. I've also used it in different cities.
- simonw 11y agoWhen I worked at Yahoo UK back in 2006ish someone wrote an app to do this.
- crawdog 11y agoAh yes... The lunch gadget. At Plumtree Software it actually helped us sell a portal deal to Thomas Weisel Partners in the early 2000's. Good old ASP/VBScript.
- stephenr 11y agoThis sounds like a uniquely American thing to me. I've never heard of this concept anywhere except California. Everywhere I've worked on-site, if people wanted to eat together they just did that weird thing people do and talk to one another.
- fosk 11y agoI don't always feel like eating what other people want to eat, the problem here is finding every day some kind of food that everybody in the group wants to eat. I always wanted to build an app that would track our preferences every day of the week, and then with machine learning predict what the team wants to eat on any given day.
- stephenr 11y agoSo go eat what you want and let them eat what they want for a day. I really cannot believe this is a thing.
- hrayr 11y agoI see you made this comment several times here, so let me try and explain... Sometimes the office pays for group lunch, if you want something else, feel free to go, but prepare to pay for it yourself (This is rarely the reason to stick with a lunch group you don't enjoy). When a group decides to go out to lunch, it's not because they all want to eat the same thing, it's because they enjoy it or recognize that it's good for office morale. Picking where to eat is a small inconvenience in this regard. Most of the time, the problem is not too many choices, it's indecision. Everyone is hungry, they all want to eat something Good, but if you ask them what you want, they can't decide. If you put a CHOICE, most people will say eh, there must be something better. But almost everyone is content or doesn't really care what to eat if there's a solid decision in place. That's why these apps take the decision making out.
- desas 11y agoOne place in the UK I worked at had something similar-ish - a breakfast butty ordering system. You designed your breakfast butty and pressed order, it would generate a spreadsheet at the of the day, for emailing to the cob shop. Someone would pick them up on the way to work the next day, distribute them and take the money.
- rectangletangle 11y agoTo some extent, yes.
- Joeri 11y agoWe sell a room and services reservation software, and have set it up so you can order lunch and have it delivered to the office, from a windows desktop client, from a browser, from outlook or from a mobile app. Billing happens automatically through the integrated contracts and billing system. It's somewhat overkill, but we consider it a form of dogfooding. The company is mcs.fm
- dofishwatchtv 11y agoWe had the simplest "app" possible - cross platform, no Go or Rust or React. It was simply the newest member of the team had to go and collect the ordered lunches, organise the menus etc. Simple algo, simple implementation.
- scrapcode 11y agoThis guy knows his computering.
- chrismorgan 11y ago“Hey, food intern! Go talk to people, ask them what they want; if they don’t react, tell ’em they’ll get dry bread and water on a rust-covered plate.”
- castell 11y agoa human computer
- A_COMPUTER 11y agoWe use a custom supybot IRC plugin.
- evanscottgray 11y agoWe did this too, then we also tied in google maps to rank them by drive time.
- kayman 11y agoI released an app recently. http://lunch-picker.com http://lunch-picker.com - Uses HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript (no server side code) - Material Design - Allows users to enter places where they normaly eat to select from
- codewithcheese 11y agoCrashed the tab with 100% cpu when I tried to untick all the options (firefox)
- ajuc 11y agoYes, we had a part of our team learn salesforce API at the time, and we ordered dinner for most of the office every day, it was cumbersome to gather the orders and phone the few food seller every day, so the first app in salesforce they written was lunch ordering app. There were even stats with favorite dishes for everybody, and average money spent :)
- evan_ 11y agoWe wrote a bot for our hipchat room that just picks from a list.
- joakiml 11y agohttps://github.com/miniloko/slack_lunchbot https://github.com/miniloko/slack_lunchbot For our lunching needs in Sweden, Skövde.
- nness 11y agoThis seems like a problem that doesn't require such an over-engineered solution. But I suppose over-engineering social arrangements is the underlying proposition of many Silicon Valley ventures...
- nathancahill 11y agoThat, and the not invented here syndrome.
- stephenr 11y agoI'm not sure there's much to invent - unless the syndrome also covers basic things like human conversation.
- dvirsky 11y agoI'm from Tel Aviv, and here we use a website (that's also a payed-for by the company credit card) to order our lunches. Anyway they don't have an API, but we sniffed their AJAX stuff a bit and added some scripts to our Hubot that allow us to use Hipchat to order and get recommendations (including an I'm Feeling Lucky mode). We have company hackathons 3-4 times a year, and almost every hackathon had one project dedicated to hack the lunch ordering website. BTW although they don't have an official API, some people here approached their team personally, and we got a bit of help in doing our unofficial hacks from them.
- lucaspiller 11y agoHow do you not get sick of being stuck in the office for 8+ hours a day? I like lunch as it gives me a break to go outside for a walk :)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dvirsky 11y agoAs I said, it's also a credit card, so we can go out with it as well, most restaurants in the city accept that card (it has a credit of about $12 a day payed for by the company, and if you use more than that it gets billed to your personal credit card. Most restaurants price their lunches to fit into this budget). Sadly there's only one restaurant within walking distance, and it's inside the same building. But I do take walks outside regardless, often right after lunch, or sometimes I like to have walking meetings. Although to be honest, if I'm in the zone, I just code all day and forget about the outside world.
- lucaspiller 11y agoOh sorry, I misunderstood. I just thought you meant it was paid for by the company. That sounds pretty cool!
- dvirsky 11y ago
- attilak 11y agoWe (well I) started an instance of Hubot on our company slack. It checks most of the restaurants near the office (scraping) and announces the daily menu and prices on request. Then we just try to pick one. We are in Vienna (Austria), BeeOne.
- egeozcan 11y agoI had created "The Lunch Planner". There's a barely-functional demo at: http://providefoodfor.us/restaurants http://providefoodfor.us/restaurants It's on Bitbucket and I need to open-source it at some point. Built with Meteor. It was my "oh let's try this shiny new framework" project.
- ggaughan 11y agoI found it painful to watch people collect everyone's orders and then phone them in and then try to work out what was in the delivery bags and who owed what. So I built https://fuseorder.com/ https://fuseorder.com/ (just add an event for each meal. You can add your own places and menus as needed)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- bayonetz 11y agoOurs was to pick which restaurant we would actually go out to eat at that day. You'd think it would be easy to just pick a place, but no, everyday it was an ordeal. To seed we it, picked a list of places and trimmed any that were vetoed by even a single person. Then with the remainder everybody got a a couple votes to cast for their favorites from the list. Then we made an actual physical Wheel of Fortune style wheel but with restaurants, each choice appearing as many times as it had been voted up in the seed list. It had about forty slots with the favorites appearing multiple times. After making that, it was super fun to pick our lunch spot everyday by spinning this big wheel. It had the little plink plink spikes that the pointer brushed past and everything. Whoever had done a good deed that day got to be the "contestant", vying for our lunch fortunes. Man, a novelty store should start selling customizable versions of these for offices...
- bigbento 11y agoWhen I worked at OkCupid Labs, we normally just did daily lunch ad-hoc. However, we set up a little app that would organize a weekly lunch "date" where people would have a one-to-one with someone from a different team. I had some pretty interesting conversations come up from that, and if I were approaching this "problem", would start from there again.
- adambutler 11y agoOhh yes... http://imgur.com/J8H7SZm http://imgur.com/J8H7SZm We're from Bristol, UK and do lunches for everybody (read more: http://simpleweb.co.uk/2013/why-we-feed-our-staff/ http://simpleweb.co.uk/2013/why-we-feed-our-staff/). We started working on an app for this but this was dropped in favour of simplicity and just do it through google forms. Here is an example form -> http://imgur.com/LgC2l79 http://imgur.com/LgC2l79
- mikejchin 11y agoWe've been experimenting with voting systems in order to decide where to eat. We weren't sure which system was the fairest, so we built apps that used plurality, probabilistic, instant-runoff, and preferential voting. It reached the point where we were voting on which voting system to use! The system we settled on was a modified Borda count (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count#Modified_Borda_count http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count#Modified_Borda_coun...). Our app isn't public, but I recommend this system, because it seems to have maximized happiness in our company!
- pgz 11y agoWhen in doubt, we used this. irb xs = %w(indian antichi ramen vietnamese bue pastificio) xs[rand(xs.size))] Otherwise we talked to one another.
- castell 11y agoI prefer the hassle-free variant: a large canteen/lunchroom with a good variation of food to choose from. They usually have a menu-plan on their websites.
- fittom 11y agoIn Berlin we have a small startup based on this idea. You can subscribe to our newsletter and we send you the daily menu of the restaurants in your area every day. With forwarding this e-mail to your colleagues, all of you can select the favourites using the up-vote buttons in the email. You can track the votes on the website, but you will receive a summary about the results as well. Give a try if you in Berlin: https://www.halb1.de/ https://www.halb1.de/
- underyx 11y agoHere's what we used at Allmyles: https://github.com/underyx/footlong https://github.com/underyx/footlong There's an Android app that lists the daily menus in Budapest, Hungary, where we're located. From there it was just a matter of finding the internal API of this app, and hooking it up to HipChat. We migrated to Slack and haven't yet got around to updating footlong to post the results there, though. I checked our HipChat yesterday and it was practically nothing but footlong posts.
- jmp3833 11y agomy manager at my previous company (EnerNOC inc.) did the same thing! lunbo(lunch-board) lunboard.appspot.com/home
- lewisl9029 11y agoGoogle Forms worked great for the last startup I worked at. https://www.google.ca/forms/about/ https://www.google.ca/forms/about/
- herval 11y agoIn all companies I worked on (around 20 including consulting clients, at least half in various cities in the US), I've never came across this "inevitability". Bad sample?
- JasonH09 11y agoI created an app for just my group of friends to pick where to go to eat. It had tags for different places and would narrow the selection down and ultimately pick one. You could say where people in the group had been recently and they would be removed, say which area of the city you wanted, delivery, take-out, dine-in, fast food, and other properties. People also had profiles where they could choose restaurants they didn't like and when you went through the picking wizard, you would indicate who was going and it would discard any restaurants that those people disliked from the potential pool. A random number generator would then make the final decision from the possible options.
- JasonH09 11y agoI created an app for just my group of friends to pick where to go to eat. It had tags for different places and would narrow the selection down and ultimately pick one. You could say where people in the group had been recently and they would be removed, say which area of the city you wanted, delivery, take-out, dine-in, fast food, and other properties. People also had profiles where they could choose restaurants they didn't like and when you went through the picking wizard, you would indicate who was going and it would discard any restaurants that those people disliked from the potential pool. A random number generator would then make the final decision from the possible options.
- tonyvanriet 11y agoPicking lunch wasn't a big problem for us, but typically one person would go pick up the lunch and pay for it, so I wrote a Slack bot to keep track of how much everybody owes. Helps a lot with minimizing the number of times you actually have to pass money around. https://github.com/tonyvanriet/lunch-bot/blob/master/doc/walkthrough.md https://github.com/tonyvanriet/lunch-bot/blob/master/doc/wal...
- nhdev 11y agoI wrote http://www.collablunch.com/ http://www.collablunch.com/ for this purpose. The team uses it pretty regularly. And yes, way over engineered. I have it on my todo list to rewrite it in Meteor since a lot of the Web Socket code I wrote Meteor would have handle automatically.
- theaccordance 11y agoCheck out Fooda: http://fooda.com http://fooda.com
- olav 11y agoWhat a sharp observation. I had one at http://dreitipps.de http://dreitipps.de (yes, German). when I worked with my colleague of sweetbits at a startup for generation 50plus.