At Oscar, we’re working tirelessly to make insurance smart and simple, but you can’t reinvent healthcare on an empty stomach. Here’s a quick look at something our engineers put together to keep us going.
“Is lunch here yet?” or “What’s for lunch?” are some of the hardest questions in an office environment. In an attempt to solve this, companies can hire daily catering, employ a service such as Seamless, or hire a full time cook.
At Oscar, each employee gets an X dollar credit toward a Seamless lunch order, 3 days per week. The credit can be applied to a rotating shortlist of restaurants, and must be used by noon. In theory, it’s a time-saving setup–employees don’t have to leave the office to get a delicious meal. But in action, there’s a problem: with a steady flow of orders arriving at our front desk, how does an individual employee know when his or her lunch has arrived? The constant checking can get tedious and time-consuming.
Our internal “Food!” HipChat room fills up with people asking if places have delivered yet, hoping someone would have already noticed this in the delivery room.
Out of this challenge, a small flask app named Lunchy, was born. At 61 lines of python and 129 lines of HTML, it’s a pretty trivial web application that even includes a small admin panel for updating the available lunch options. “Trivial,” that is, until lunchtime rolls around!