@odtudeyemek
A campus food guide for METU — @odtudeyemek
In undergrad at Middle East Technical University (METU / ODTÜ) I started @odtudeyemek — a guide to every eatery on campus, posted publicly so freshmen, students, and faculty could actually find the tasty gems hidden across one of the largest campuses in Turkey.
Back then, building an app as an architecture undergrad was out of reach: my CS friends didn’t have the bandwidth to help, and I didn’t have the stack to do it alone. So I used Instagram’s infrastructure as the platform — a feed of campus eateries that doubled as a design artifact. The account grew to ~5k followers, and the printed/poster version of the guide circulated through METU bus stops, shuttles, dorms, and DMs in numbers I could never quantify, beyond the people I’d spot reading it in the wild.
I was also part of the ODTÜ Gastronomy Society during this time, and the project was written up in a few places back home:
I tried to make the guide official — to integrate it with the school so it could outlive me — but the administration wasn’t willing. After graduation I moved to Munich and the project went quiet.
What it could have been
When I got to CMU I came across CMU Eats — basically the platform-native version of what I’d been building by hand on Instagram, and exactly what I would have wanted to build for METU if I’d had the tech stack. METU is a much larger campus with far more food gems, and I was already in constant contact with eatery owners who would DM me their daily menus. With the right tooling, that signal could have been streamed to the entire campus. It’s the project I dreamed of and didn’t get to ship.
Where it lives now
The Instagram account is still up as the archive: @odtudeyemek.