Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?

I 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.

Picking 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/wal...

I wrote 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.

I 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.