Get the latest tech news

Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House

Bit of a sticky situation.

No live feed, no map, and certainly no counter of closed restaurants — just a few wisps of a mention on Wikipedia pages and articles throughout the web ( including one blog post on their actual website! Using some light data scraping and processing with Python, along with a Next.js frontend and Redis implementation for caching, I was able to make a live map that tracked which Waffle Houses were closed, and by extension, which parts of the country might be going south. Shortly after getting blocked (and after the hurricane had passed), I woke up to an email from someone with a Very High Up Position at Waffle House informing me that I needed to immediately “cease and desist all unauthorized use of Trademarks owned by WH Intellectual, LLC and any confusingly similar marks in connection with your website.”

Get the Android app