Since the nineties I have been a web developer, but for the last decade my time coding has declined but ideas still pop up from time to time.
For the last ten years I’ve had a couple of Raspberry PIs in my closet, acting as web servers, Minecraft servers and experimentation platforms. And as of late, it also hosts some single purpose PWA:s (Progressive web applications) that I use to make every day life a tiny bit easier.
One of these PWA:s is a small app that sends me a push notification at 7:20 each morning, and tells me what my son is getting for lunch in school. This way we can plan so that he doesn’t eat fish (his worst!) twice on the same day, and we can plan so that he at least eat one meal a day that he somewhat likes. Even though a ten year old boy hardly likes anything that isn’t brown, beige or deep fried.
Anyway, the app is built by prompting what I need in ChatGPT. It took about 30 minutes to get the first version up, and from there I refined some things and kept some things. Now the app is up and running since the start of this semester, and it is still going.
The main idea is that the app subscribes to my sons schools lunch menu from an rss-feed at skolmaten.se. The app then posts the full weeks menu but only pushes todays lunch.
That means that I can open the app whenever I want, in order to plan for upcoming grocery shopping and cooking. And every morning I get a reminder of what’s served today. It really works!
Since ChatGPT remembers our conversations it is really easy to iterate the application to fit my needs, and also scale it up. Future functions, in this scenario, could be to allow users to search for a school and add it to their subscription and also subscribe to more than one school. And you can combine todays lunch from different schools in the same push, instead of adding multiple push notifications.
Some of the problems I’ve run into is that ChatGPT assumes and therefor can build solutions that doesn’t work. But that can be fixed by telling ChatGPT not to assume stuff and instead ask more questions.
All this is hosted on a Raspberry PI in my closet. The investment is really small, but I would say that you need to be familiar with programming and feel somewhat safe working in a command prompt/terminal.