Friday, November 10, 2006

You Can Call Me Kimota, or You Can Call Me Matt, But Don't Call Me Late for Dinner

Want to know what we're having for dinner tonight? Or maybe tomorrow night, or early next week? Chances are you can find out by clicking here and glancing at the plain text output of the Meal Planner application that I wrote in Java over the Christmas 2004 holiday season.

It all started because I couldn't take the daily query of, "What do you feel like for dinner tonight?" that came my way by phone, or e-mail, or Instant Messenger, or even first-person verbal communication, from my lovely wife. A better man than me would've thought, "Wow, she makes the vast majority of our dinners without the slightest prompting, and all I have to do is suggest what to make." Bad me of course thought, "I haven't even figured out what to have for lunch yet, and she's already asking me what I want for supper!"

At some point, I made the offhand comment to Vicki, "Y'know, if all you need is a randomly-generated meal suggestion, I could write a program to do that! It wouldn't even be all that hard." And she just smiled.

It only took me a few months to get around to it, but I will say that I wrote a lot of the logic in my head during that time. So it wasn't like I was really procrastinating. Not really.

Anyway, I spent the better part of my Christmas break that year writing code, showing her stuff, getting awesome feedback on how to make it actually useful, and writing more code. At the end of it all, we had ourselves a very nifty Meal Planner that we've been using ever since. So for the past twenty-three months, nearly every dinner, or at least the idea for it, has been generated by a few thousand lines of Java code I wrote. Meal suggestions come out of it, several weeks' worth at a time, each one nicely spaced out by individual (and user-set) frequencies and categories, such that we hardly even think about it anymore.

So I'm left to think, "Wow, she makes the vast majority of our dinners without the slightest prompting, and all I had to do was write some software!"

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My favourite meal still remains....wait for it...fend for yourself night! Yay!