Over the past year, we’ve been using my app, Lunch, almost every day to decide from a plethora of downtown SF restaurant choices. I made it as a fun little tool to teach myself new technologies, but it ended up becoming a routine — a sort of mainstay of our company culture.

While Lunch is open-source, and a few of our friends and clients voiced interest in trying it out for their own teams, deploying their own instance of Lunch proved to be a bit too much work.

That’s why I’ve turned Lunch from an instance into a service. This means that anyone will be able to sign up on our deployment of Lunch (now located at the apt new URL of lunch.pink), create their own team, and invite their members, without needing to get into the Node.JS weeds.

Lunch remains an open-source project, though, which is not normal for most web services. But its GitHub repository now serves as a great example of how we at Lab Zero manage user credentials, sessions, subdomains, and a whole lot more within an Express environment. That, and I’ve increased its coverage from just 12 to over 250 unit tests.

So if you and your team have been looking to branch out when lunchtime rolls around, give Lunch a try! Enter your email for an invitation and you’ll be Lunching it up in no time.

For more information about Lunch, check out its new About page, complete with a very readable, succinct privacy policy. And if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to email me.