We have a bot in Slack that randomly picks places from a list of nearby restaurants.
same, the slackbot "random response" thing is a great 80% solution for so many things
Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?
21–30 of 68 posts
Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?
#22Yes, 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 :)
Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?
#23This 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 .
One 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.
Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?
#24We wrote a bot for our hipchat room that just picks from a list.
Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?
#25This 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 .
Yeah... at my office this leads to endless amounts of bikeshedding, because the goal is consensus and everyone gets a veto. We would wind up at the same three spots every damn time.
I shortcut this by appointing myself lunch dictator.
Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?
#26https://github.com/miniloko/slack_lunchbot
For our lunching needs in Sweden, Skövde.
Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?
#27This 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...
Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?
#28We use a custom supybot IRC plugin.
We did this too, then we also tied in google maps to rank them by drive time.
Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?
#29I'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.
Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?
#30We (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.