Ballard Spot Roulette

I made Ballard Spot Roulette, an app that randomly picks from restaurants, bars, cafes, and dessert spots in Ballard when you can’t decide where to eat. No accounts, no ads, no signups.

My girlfriend and I used to take turns picking where to eat. I’d spend twenty minutes scrolling Yelp and still end up at the same place, so she got tired of waiting. One day I decided to build an app to solve it. When I showed it to her, she laughed and said I had to share it.

The picker leans toward places that are open or about to open. You can filter by category if you’re in the mood for something specific. It started as our own favorites pulled from Google location history, and it’s grown steadily since.

The happy hour indicators are a mess. Some spots like Moshi Moshi Sushi have split schedules, lunch then dinner on weekdays, but the data only supports one time range per day. So it can show “Open ‘til 2:30 PM” with “Happy Hour at 4 PM,” which is technically correct but leaves a confusing gap in between. I know, I’ll fix it.

It’s not perfect, but it’s saved us from the “where should we eat?” argument more times than I can count. It even got featured on My Ballard, which I didn’t expect from a random picker I built over a weekend.