I accidentally became Florida's food safety department

Three weeks ago I built a website because I wanted to know if the taco place near me had flies in it. It did. Two, in the prep area, according to a state inspector who wrote it down in a tone I can only describe as "resigned."

That website has now had 500,000 visits. Half a million. I have checked the number several times, in the specific way you check a bank balance you don't believe, and it keeps being real.

I would like to tell you this was the plan. It was not the plan. The plan was tacos.

How this happened, as far as I can tell

Florida inspects every restaurant in the state and publishes every result. This is genuinely great. It then publishes those results as spreadsheets on a website that looks like it was last updated when flip phones were aspirational, behind a lookup form that wants your restaurant's license number. Do you know your restaurant's license number? No. Nobody does. The inspector might.

So the data was public in the way a book is public if it's at the bottom of a lake. I dredged the lake. All of it — 440,441 inspections, 79,267 restaurants, every county, every finding in the inspector's own words. It took a weekend and about four cups of coffee I did not need.

Then I put it on the internet and went back to my actual job, which is building a dozen other things that approximately nine people use.

And then it just… went. I don't know why. I have no analytics, no marketing, no social media, and no theory. Somebody found it, and then a great many somebodies found it, and I found out about it by looking at a server graph that had stopped being a line and become a wall. If you're the person who started it: thank you, and also, what did you do?

Things I have learned from half a million strangers

Everyone wants to know about the place they already love. I assumed people would come for the horror show. Some do. But the search box tells a different story: people look up the restaurant they've been going to for fifteen years, find out it's clean, and feel vindicated. I have inadvertently built a machine for confirming that your favorite diner is fine. You're welcome.

Restaurants have found it. The emails come in two flavors: the angry kind, and the "can I get the badge on a sign for the window" kind. To the ones who've asked whether they can pay to be removed: no. To the ones who've asked whether they can pay to be featured: also no, but I admire the pivot. The badge people, though — hold that thought.

It costs me five dollars a month. Half a million visits. Five dollars. I want that on a plaque. Every "you'll need enterprise infrastructure for that" I've ever been told in a meeting is now filed under "things men said to me with confidence."

I don't know who any of you are, and I like it that way. There's no tracker on the site. The number comes from Cloudflare telling me how many pages it served — it knows nothing about who asked, and neither do I. I could know more. I've chosen not to, because I'm autistic and the idea of being watched while I look something up makes my skin try to leave. I assume yours does too.

The bit where I get sincere for one paragraph

I build small things, alone, for reasons that are mostly "this should exist and nobody's done it." Most of them are used by a handful of people and that's fine — that's the job. But every so often one of them turns out to be something a lot of people needed and didn't know how to ask for, and the feeling of that is hard to describe without sounding like a greeting card. So I'll just say: it's a good feeling. Thank you for looking.

Okay. Sincerity over.

What's next

The badge people are right. A kitchen that goes a full year without a single finding has done something genuinely hard, and it deserves more than a small green square on my website. So: printable certificates for clean kitchens, signed, dated, the kind of thing you'd actually put on a wall. I'm not promising a date, because I've met me. But it's the next thing.

Go look up wherever you're eating tonight — eatsafelyinflorida.com. If it's got a badge, tell the staff. If it's got flies, well. Now you know. That was the whole point.