Today's Meal in Marmara

What's in lunch today? Ah, here is my notification!

February 02, 2020 - 5 min read

Technologies Used: Xcode, Android Studio

Was Planned For: Windows Phone?, iOS, Android

I was a student of Bilkent University once. In this blog post, I'm not going to talk about my education experience. I'm going to talk about the cafeteria experience. The cafeteria was named after Marmara. Here is some info about the actual Marmara.

Marmara was pretty good. You went in, waited the queue for a short time, then you grabbed a tray. There were a few options for starters, mains, sides and desert. The problem is, you never knew what the options were if you didn't check the Marmara's website. I mean, it wasn't difficult to open the website, but one day during a dead boring class I thought it might be cool if we could send the food menu as a notification to people's phones.

I was in my junior year in uni and wanted to get back to mobile development. This was my opportunity. I was going to extract the food menu from Marmara's website, and then send it as a notification to the people who installed my app!

I made the initial mockups and started prototyping, but uni was taking too much time. I never got to complete this project. Then I got very busy in my senior year with LodeStar. This project got swept under the carpet, and never became a reality. Here is what I planned it to look like:

I initially imagined it would have the same design as Apple Wallet (called PassBook before). You would have cards for each day of the week and you could swipe up and down to see your other meal cards.

Even though I never got to complete this project, a student named Selim made a java library that retrieves the food in the cafeteria. Here is a link to his GitHub. His work seems cool. If you're reading this, keep up the good work!

Moral of the story is:

Even though you never get to complete a project, you can discover cool new GitHub repos.

Like the repo for this website.