ImHungry

If this was a web application...

I think speed and availability are the most important features to improve on for a web application. I noticed all of the start and end times are always on the hour. We can use this to our advantage by pre-filtering and pre-sorting the food trucks for every hour of the week.

I would fetch the data as a daily / hourly background worker and store the response in a database. Once the fetch worker is successful and complete, another worker would bucket the food trucks into an in-memory key/value data store (redis or memcache). The keys of this cache would be the day_of_week,hour_of_day. In O(1) time, we could retrieve a sorted list at any hour. The bucket cache will consume worst-case additional 8.4MB of memory [0]. This will make reads super quick since we will not need to filter and sort. Assuming N trucks with K trucks in the current hour, the complexity costs of filtering and sorting is O(N + Klog(K)).

This approach will have high availability since it will not be dependent on external services since the web requests will always retrieve the data from our own servers.

[0] - 24 hours * 7 days * 50 bytes * 1000 trucks = ~8.4 megabytes if we have 1000 trucks open 24/7.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'im_hungry'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install im_hungry

Usage

$ im_hungry

Example output:

$ im_hungry

Here is what is open:

Page 1 of 2
Bay Area Dots, LLC at 900 BEACH ST
Bonito Poke at 409 ILLINOIS ST
Casey's Pizza, LLC at 1 POST ST
Expresso Subito, LLC. at 150 CALIFORNIA ST

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.