

Eating our own dog food (for lunch) - dylancollins
http://p.ota.to/blog/2013/09/eating_our_own_dogfood/

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ChuckMcM
I agree that getting up and moving is good for you, so having lunch delivered
to your desk is probably not the best idea.

That said, it reminds me of a funny story. At Sun (Mtn View) we would go to La
Cosentena[1] and get burritos, you could fax in an order for 'will call' and
pick it up which made things a bit smoother. An engineer decided to show off
the distributed object technology Sun was building with an example app called
'burrito tool' that you could select your burrito and it would fax it to La
Cosentena for pickup.

It was great, and fun, and we bragged about it. Then some enterprising Sales
Engineer made a copy and took it with him for use at a trade show. We showed
up for lunch and none of our burritos were made, they explained they had been
getting hundreds of faxed in burrito orders all morning and stopped making
them when nobody came to pick them up. Sure enough, Burrito Tool, even from
the floor of the conference in New York city, found the Object request broker
back at HQ and forwarded Burrito requests to the real object back in Mtn View.
Holy bogus burritos!

[1] [http://www.yelp.com/biz/la-coste%C3%B1a-mountain-
view-2](http://www.yelp.com/biz/la-coste%C3%B1a-mountain-view-2)

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jon-wood
Office assistants bringing food to your desk. So you don't have to leave your
desk ever, for any reason. Call me crazy but I quite like standing up and
leaving my desk to get some lunch.

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rheide
Leaving your desk and going for a stroll (outside or inside) is great for
mental peace. Standing in a long queue with a horde of other people for 15
minutes is not. This is an elegant solution to the problem :)

(Disclaimer: I am a Potato.)

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jon-wood
Fair point, I spend most of my week working from home, and when in the office
we have a rota for people making lunch which we thence sit down to eat, so I'm
a little out of touch with the lunchtime rush!

I'm totally behind the idea of lunch at work, I just think its something that
can be handled far better than dumping a meal at your desk

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lmm
My old^3 workplace has had an equivalent for years, but running via IRC/SMS
(it's been around since before phones were good at complex webpages) - a
small, tight Java codebase. Sometimes I despair at how many extra layers of
cruft seem to be spent making everything webby (memcache for an app this
simple? really?), when the end result is the same level of functionality.

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MrBuddyCasino
I also raised an eyebrow at the mention of memcache - but hey, if the outcome
is that the intern learns a thing or two, why not.

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fvrghl
Please add some left-padding to the content...

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prottmann
How long did it take to build the app with all functions?

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mrgoldenbrown
Just as important, how much did the intern learn while building it? Sounds
like they got to touch a number of different APIs, libraries, and concepts.

~~~
thomaspurchas
A stupendous amount. Before starting this project I had never done any complex
frontend stuff. Pretty much just HTML CSS and a bit of jQuery.

With this one project I learned about backbone, marionette and the limits of
what can be done on the frontend. It was quite a big learning curve, and even
now I'm still discovering where the correct balance of frontend-back end stuff
is.

Overall a great experience, really opened my eyes to the power of JavaScript,
before I had adamantly stuck to nothing more exciting than HTML forms with JS
validation.

