yehonatanz / lunch-stats

Lunch Stats

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How to contribute

What is this?

A very basic utility to graph lunch arrival times

Why?

I got sick of guessing when my food delivery will arrive based on gut feeling and decided to utilize a data based approach 🤓

How?

My company has a dedicated WhatsApp chat for announcing when a food delivery arrives. I exported this chat to a txt file and wrote a python parser to convert it to JSON and a tiny Plotly based frontend. The entire thing is packed into a single HTML file for easy offline sharing.

Wait but:

1. Why not use WhatsApp's API? That requires a server, credentials and possibly a WhatsApp business account
2. Why not generate the chat file by scraping? WhatsApp's web UI implements infinte scroll, which limits scraping (or requires Selenium-like solution, which I didn't feel like implementing)
3. Why not generate the chat by querying IndexedDB? Skimmed it and looks like it holds encrypted messages. Figuring out how to decode those would take me more time than parsing a txt file
4. Why plot by search pattern instead of by resturaunt? Identifying, extracting and normalizing resturatunts from free text WhatsApp message requires more NLP/heuristics effort than I was willing to put in

What's next?

• Autocompletion in search textbox by existing strings Thanks @ofergoli
• Tags UI for searching multiple resturaunts, instead of separating by commas Thanks @ofergoli
• Percentiles view Thanks again @ofergoli
• Mobile support
• Allow grouping multiple searches as a single resturaunt (or do it automagically)
• There are more possible improvements, but they will pend for user feedback 😇

That's awesome! How can I help?

• Are you a developer? You're welcome tackle any of the issues in the What's next section!
• Are you in this WhatsApp group? Make sure to report as quickly as possible and with consistent spelling!
• Are you in this WhatsApp group for longer than I am? You can export the chat and send it to me so we'll have more historic data!
• Do you have an idea for a cool feature? Open an issue!
• Order me lunch!