Kentucky Fried Coding
Coding and chicken tenders seem like an obscure combination, but one U-M student made the best of it
—By Drew Tallquist
In 2016, a high school sophomore, Adam Liang, found himself on the losing end of a coding class. The class was intended to introduce high schoolers to college-level use of the C++ programming language. At the time, the class made the activity look overwhelming. “It was interesting because it was like solving puzzles, but I didn’t think I was going to do [coding],” he told me regarding the experience. “It was very hard.”
Now a Computer Science major at the University of Michigan, Liang showed me, with two taps on his keyboard, how to run a search of every U-M dining hall for any food item. As it turns out, this double-tap was the start to a phenomenon that spread throughout campus between 2019 and 2020: a tale of enjoyment with a bittersweet ending, a brand called “Umich Tendies.”
Codeword: Chicken Tenders
The start to Liang’s tender-venture came in the form of a recurring tendency to which many college students in Ann Arbor can relate. “Every day I would look at the Michigan Dining website and say, God, like, are chicken tenders going to be served today?” Before Umich Tendies, chicken tenders weren’t as prevalent in the university’s dining halls. All seven spaces—Bursley, Mosher-Jordan, Markley, South Quad, North Quad, East Quad, and Oxford—served the entree on a random weekly or bi-weekly basis, with Markley serving every Friday. Any single day could be “chicken tenders day” at the right location, meaning that tender-stans like Liang would possibly have to check every University-generated menu on a given day.
After a while, the act of manually searching for the fried delicacy became a nuisance, leading Liang to wonder how this process could be improved. He relates his pondering to that of brushing one’s teeth, another common recurring process. “It’s a habit and it’s required, but sometimes it can get annoying; it’s just the same process over and over again. Like what if there is a way to snap your fingers and your teeth were brushed, you know what I mean?”
This thought manifested into an idea that Liang could work around: a set of code to search the University’s dining hall database. How does it work? “I can just get all this code and read every character one by one to see, and then look for patterns like the phrase ‘chicken tenders,’” he explained, “And if the chicken tenders phrase was present in a certain location on this code, then I knew it was in the dining halls.”
The making of the archaic code was not difficult for Liang, though his first task of integrating the dining hall source code into his own code revealed to be an obstacle. In order to be able to manipulate a set of code, the programmer has to hold the sequence within a container, a space on a computer where any original code can still function and be manipulated. “That was my biggest problem,” Liang said. Once he figured out how to accomplish this, the project became easier—he finished the rest in eight hours.
Red Hearts for the Tendies
With a functioning code now complete, Liang was able to do as he envisioned—he could search every meal at every dining hall on-campus for chicken tenders. He kept the existence of the project between himself and some of his friends, who loved the idea. This, of course, would change with the next step in the project’s history, the Instagram account.
Liang did not have the idea himself; rather, it was a suggestion by one of his friends, Justin. “He was like, ‘Why don’t you post on Instagram every day a picture of chicken tenders and where the chicken tenders are in the dining halls?’”said Liang. “If anyone has to be credited the most, it is probably Justin.”
Umich Tendies made its first post on December 10, 2019, and, as many Instagram users can testify, traffic on a new account starts very low. “For the first week or two, we only had ten likes per post,” Liang said, “and the first post only had, like, five.” However, the page didn’t stay in the shadows for long, thanks to a random post about the account in the student-administered Facebook group “UMich Memes for Wolverteens.” The post unintentionally resulted in a blow-up of sorts: Umich Tendies received about three hundred followers within three hours of the post. Since then, the number of likes per post grew from an average of 15 to at least 150, a sign of significant growth. “I guess it’s good that word can spread,” Liang said with a smile.
Funnily enough, with the Instagram account came other methods of engagement with Umich Tendies around the platform. Students could (and were encouraged to) send photos of themselves with their chicken tenders in the dining halls to the account, where the photos would then be posted in the Stories feature. Many of these highlights, as well as memes, fan-submitted questions, and more can be found on their profile page @umich.tendies.
Mobile Tendies
Eventually, however, Liang realized the difficulties of his code-and-post process, including the timing of his posts. “I would post at midnight every night, but I’m not always on my computer at midnight,” he told me. If he was on his computer, he had to deal with a slow computer that had to be connected to battery power with every use. In addition, many students were losing interest in the idea of eating chicken tenders daily, an effect of South Quad’s daily chicken tenders station. Toss in the circumstances with the university’s reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic—which essentially restricted or closed dining halls operations—and, by the end of the Winter 2020 semester, online engagement with the Instagram account declined.
As it turns out, though, COVID-19 gave Liang an opportunity that he, a programmer, had always wanted to do. “Over the summer, I was like, I have some time. I really want to learn how to make an app. Let me go ahead and make that.” And, of course, his first choice was to create the Umich Tendies mobile application.
The journey of creating the app was a new experience for Liang. He used the developing program Dart, a product of Google created in 2011. He began learning and applying the language into development in early June of 2020, finishing it that July.
During the experience, Liang found that his biggest challenge was not learning a new coding language, but the actual visual of the application itself. “I’m terrible with design,” he admitted. The Instagram page, to him, did not require aesthetic attention (“If you ever see the Instagram page, it’s the same chicken tenders over again” he chuckled), but for a developed app, the need for a cleaner, more authentic visual was more apparent. The original draft of the software entirely consisted of rows—“stripes” as he referred to them— of text boxes, where clicking on the text would direct the user to the respective location. However, after testing layout options with feedback from his parents and his friend, Dylan, Liang would finally rest on the simple three-button model seen on the app.
One of the biggest additions that the app brought to the Umich Tendies brand is its search and filter features, where users can search for any food item (not limited to chicken tenders) across campus dining, and filter menu items based on dietary restrictions. Liang made the decision to add the search option for simplicity. “Chicken tenders are universally loved by a lot of people, but I feel like the code modification for finding extra food can’t be that hard. So I added that functionality. And then I said, if I can add that, I can also add [dietary] restrictions to it.” This was a feat that Liang was proud of, and well-deserved for a coding student; those who develop and update the University of Michigan’s own student application were not able to produce such a set of features.
Where Are They Now?
Now in 2021, after roughly a year and a half of planning, coding, posting, and developing, Liang has done much for the chicken tender culture at the University of Michigan. What started as a fun, no-stakes side-project grew to be a phenomenon that spread its way around campus, which granted both opportunistic starts, with a bittersweet end, to the college junior.
Liang now serves as both a sustainability intern and a computer consultant with M-Dining, the University’s department for food and campus meals. Their relationship initiated during the Winter 2020 semester with M-Dining’s piqued interest in the Instagram page, and became stronger when the app was released. Liang hopes to eventually be able to work on the University of Michigan mobile app, where he could improve the features on the dining section, including adding the long-desired search bar to the user interface, and learn from professionals.
Unfortunately, this outcome would come with a price on Liang’s behalf. “Umich Tendies is probably obsolete after that, because you can just go to the Michigan app, which has more functionality besides dining halls,” he commented. He knew his brand’s ever-nearing demise was approaching—the university has expressed intentions to put their data in a “farm,” a private programming container. “We won’t have public access to it. So I couldn’t just go on the source code and retrieve that information.”
Despite the life of his endeavors drawing nearer to its end, Liang is not saddened at the thought. “I’m not heartbroken,” he said. “I learned a lot from it and I had a lot of fun.”
And as for the dining hall that serves the best chicken tenders? A few seconds, some eye darting, a thoughtful sigh. “Markley,” he said.
The Umich Tendies mobile app is available on the App Store on iPhone and iPad.
Featured Photo by Drew Tallquist