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Ask HN: What did it take for me to get my cheeseburger?

Article news.ycombinator.com

Ask HN: What did it take for me to get my cheeseburger?

I just ordered a takeout meal from a Denny's restaurant 4 blocks from where I live. I called the local number and ended up connected to a call center in India, where they completed the order. Then I went and picked it up and paid with a credit card. After chuckling about the absurdity of ordering a cheeseburger on the other side of the planet, I started to think about all the infrastructure it took for that process to happen.

On my phone I opened the Denny's app and tried to place an order. I order often enough for the app to be useful, but failure rate is about 20%. It failed that time so I called the direct local number, which in turn routed through a central phone tree that handled all Denny's calls. After navigating the phone tree, there were three clicks over 3 seconds or so and I heard a man with an Indian accent declare the full street address of the location I was trying to reach.

That was probably a VoIP connection over the internet using undersea cabling going from California > Japan > Chennai/Mumbai. His call center routed the call to him and he entered it into his workstation. That triggered a hand-off to APIs from the Denny's servers which connected to the actual Denny's location and its ordering system. Then it got displayed on a kitchen status screen for the cook to complete.

So we've got multiple protocols of traffic routers along that whole path, servers that are load balanced and distributed, many databases of different capabilities, security checks and firewalls, network redundancy, custom software for Denny's at different layers, boilerplate VoIP, network, accounting, and scheduling software. App development and distribution, UI and front-end development of the status and entry screens for the operator, cook, and hostess.

What else can HN think of? What other global tech did it take for me to get a cheeseburger from 4 blocks away?

Discussion 2 comments · 2 points · ogou · 2021-02-08
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