Table Ready

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  Sample dinner: start time, timeline chart and clock-time checklist

Inspiration

One person often has to serve several dishes at the same time with one oven and only a few burners. Each dish has its own steps, oven temperatures and resting times, so it is hard to know when to start each one.

What it does

Table Ready makes a cooking schedule for a multi-dish dinner. You enter the serve time, the number of burners, and each dish with its ordered steps (hands-on, oven with a temperature, stove, or rest). The app shows a headline (the sample plan starts at 3:50 PM for a 6:30 PM dinner, 160 minutes in total), a timeline chart, a checklist with clock times, warnings, and a print view.

The scheduler follows these rules:

• One cook's hands do one thing at a time.
• At most N stove steps run at once.
• Oven steps at different temperatures never overlap. Steps at the same temperature can share the oven.
• The steps of a dish stay in order.
• Make-ahead dishes with a long final rest are moved earlier.

In the sample plan, the 180°C pie is scheduled before the 200°C chicken and potatoes, which share the oven. With only one burner, a stove dish can be ready early, and the plan shows a warning.

How we built it

Table Ready is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It has no server and needs no API keys. The scheduler has Node assert tests (node test/scheduler.test.js). I built it with an AI coding agent (Claude) and the Devpost Learn Skill Pack. The planning documents are in the devpost/ folder of the repository. I started from an empty folder on 2026-10-18, during the submission period, with no earlier code.

Challenges we ran into

• The first version put the chicken 95 minutes too early. This was fixed.
• A new test found the one-burner case where a dish finishes early. We added a warning for it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• A working scheduler with a sample dinner that follows all the rules above.
• Tests that caught real bugs during the build.

What we learned

Writing the rules down first (hands, burners, oven temperatures, step order) made the scheduler easier to build and test. Tests found a case that the first version missed.

What's next for Table Ready

The scheduler is greedy, so it is not always optimal. Oven steps do not need hands, and the app assumes one oven. Next steps are a better (optimal) scheduler and support for more than one oven.

Built With

• claude
• css
• html
• javascript
• node.js