Every Friday we hold gaming nights in the labs at uni, and invariably pizza gets ordered at some point. This is great, but the traditional way of group purchasing by huddling round someone's laptop doesn't work when there are 50 of you.
Enter pizza-get. A lightweight web app to make bulk ordering pizza that little bit easier (projects where the problem domain includes knowledge of the dominoes menu are the best projects). It's been interesting to develop due to the fact that weekly gaming sessions mean that seven day mini sprints are the way to go. While that doesn't leave much time to get things planned, developed, and tested, it has made things so much easier with regards to prioritizing which features to implement next.
But for me, the really interesting part of the project is that it processes card payments. Coming from the 'what would be really cool' list of ideas (as opposed to the 'what I think I can implement' one), it's turned out to be a success. Offloading the actual nitty-gritty of the transactions to Stripe saves the hassle of having to protect sensitive information and verify transactions, and means that what seemed like the scariest part of development was by far the easiest. Outsourcing does introduce a fee, but it's worth it if we don't need to source exact change from 50 people.
I did consider writing the back end in java originally, but after deciding to keep things as light as possible settled on a PHP back end with bootstrap for the UI (themed with Flat UI). I'll probably wind up active development after this Friday, which would add up to three weeks of programming. Pretty short lived, but once it does what it needs to it seems better to move on and try something new.
GitHub: https://github.com/mcnutty26/pizza-get
Live: https://pizza.uwcs.co.uk/
