One possible way to solve this task was to do it by hand. This was perfectly viable for the easy subproblem, but you probably had to give up as soon as a robot asked you for ten factorial in binary :)
As in real life, a much better way to run a restaurant is to automate as much of the process as you can. The practice problem R may have served as inspiration: you can use your own program to repeatedly access the restaurant dashboard. The program then needs two more ingredients:
However, there was an even easier way to solve this task. Instead of implementing a whole new framework to talk to our server you can reuse an existing one. Which one? Well, the one in your browser, of course!
The two main ways to do this were:
Download the whole dashboard (including the javascript) to your local machine. Modify the local copy of the dashboard javascript to talk to our server instead of your localhost. Then you can implement all the customer handlers directly in that javascript.
Write the handlers in your local editor and then paste them into your browser’s javascript console to add them to the code of the actual dashboard.
The first option is probably safer in that you can restart it as you please without accidentally losing some of the logic you added to the code.
The “elevator music” used on the dashboard to notify you that a customer is waiting is a recording of a piece called “The Flea Waltz” by Flying_Deer_Fx, made available under a Creative Commons 0 license.