There are truly few things worse than craving a cool, sweet Macca’s soft serve and rolling up to the drive through only to hear those dreaded words: “sorry, machine’s not working.”
U.S. software engineer Rashiq Zahid was familiar with this terrible sting, so, McHero that he is, he stepped up and decided to actually do something about it.
The 24-year-old created McBroken, a website that uses clever coding shit to track soft serve machines nation-wide, and report on which ones are busted at any one time.
As he himself explained:
“I reverse engineered McDonald’s internal API and I’m currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute at every McDonald’s in the US to figure out which locations have a broken ice cream machine.”
Put another way, he found a way into the guts of some complicated computer shit, and wrote a code that orders soft serve every 30 minutes, by adding one to the cart on the mobile app.
If it’s unavailable at any particular location, then that location is marked with a red dot on the constantly-updating map, and voila, nobody has to miss out!
I reverse engineered mcdonald’s internal api and I’m currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute at every mcdonald’s in the US to figure out which locations have a broken ice cream machine https://t.co/2KsRwAdrMd
— rashiq (@rashiq) October 22, 2020
Zahid’s site currently only works in the US, but if any Aussies are smart enough to have a crack, the soft serve lovers of the nation would surely be in your debt.
