Kanttiinit is open source?🤯
Help us build it. It's used by ten thousand students in the Greater Helsinki area.
Do you know Svelte? Or maybe you're a React wizard? Wanna learn Flutter? Or build an OSM tileserver?
Clone the source Chat with us› Yes
› Yes
› Yes
The Story So Far
Wow, this is actually the first marketing that we've ever done.
In 2015, Otaniemi had no good website for finding the
tastiest lunch between all the different canteens. We built
it for our own use and shared the link with our friends.
It solved a problem we ran into every day — and others
noticed too. We always wanted it to be free and open source,
forever, and will keep it that way.
Fast forward to 2025, it's used by ten thousand students every week.
What You Can Get From Kanttiinit
By contributing to the project you can develop your portfolio, learn web development and maybe code with us. And perhaps we can learn something from you. We're very open to mentoring junior developers who want to learn while doing.
We want to continue giving to the community and helping students, perhaps someday giving the project away to the student union.
We need help for supporting new restaurants, fixing parsers, maybe making some parsing more automagical, polish the UX, fix bugs, imagine new features and take things forward.
Tech Stack
It's a mix of different technologies. We have a trusty NodeJS backend, a PostgreSQL database, and a SolidJS frontend.
We've always chosen the tech that is relevant and that we want to learn. If you want to have an excuse to learn something new, pick what you want to learn and start hacking. You can contact us if you need help or mentoring.
SvelteKit and static (pre)rendering is something we are playing with to learn and maybe modernise our app, if only we had time...
We don't have a feature roadmap, but we're looking to modernise and simplify. Long term we're
looking to make the webapp more portable and perhaps serverless. And we always need more, and more robust,
menu parsers! 🤖
Making it easier to add new restaurants and canteens is a priority to support even more students,
even outside of the Greater Helsinki area.
If You're Interested
Contact us or make a fork and PR to our web repo for example. We're happy to help you get started.
Talk to us: join our Telegram group
or connect with us on GitHub if that works for you.
The Team
Together we have over 40 years of coding experience (no cap, 👴) from startups and slightly bigger companies, both outside and inside Finland. Sprinkled with some experience from hackathons etc, also winning some. And the passion to learn.
Our backgrounds are in Aalto University, studying Computer Science, Information Networks with some Arts apparently in there as well.
We've all graduated, in one way or another, and are in the industry now. We've been working on this project for a long, long time and wish to let others have the same experience we've had building stuff for the community.