Culinary Connections

Culinary Connections: Your go-to social hub for exploring and sharing mouthwatering recipes and diverse cuisines. Connect with fellow foodies, discover culinary delights, and unleash your inner chef!

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Our Team's First Hackathon - Treehacks 2024

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project was from the memories we recalled when sharing food and recipes with our families. As students, we wanted to create the prototype for an app that could help bring this same joyful experience to others, whether it be sharing a simple recipe to potentially meeting new friends.

What it does

Our app, although currently limited in functionality, is intended to quickly share recipes while also connecting people through messaging capabilities. Users would be able to create a profile and share their recipes with friends and even strangers. An explore tab and search tab were drafted to help users find new cuisine they otherwise may have never tasted.

How we built it

We designed the layout of our app in Figma and then implemented the front end and back end in xCode using Swift. The backend was primarily done with Firebase to allow easier account creation and for cloud storage. Through this, we created various structs and fields to allow user input to be registered and seen on other accounts as well. Through the use of Figma, we were able to prototype various cells that would be embedded through a table view for easy scrolling. These pages were created from scratch and with the help of stock-free icons taken from TheNounProject.

Challenges we ran into

While we were able to create a front end and a back end, we were unable to successfully merge the two leaving us with an incomplete project. For our first hackathon, we were easily ambitious but eager to attempt this. It was our first time doing both the front end and back end with no experience from either teammate. We ended up spending a lot of time putting together the UI, which led to complications with learning SwiftUI. A lot of time was spent learning how to navigate Swift and also looking into integrating our backend. Unfortunately, we were unable to make a functioning app that lined up with our goals.

Alongside our development issues, we ran into problems with GitHub, where pulling new commits would erase our progress on xCode to an earlier version. We were unable to fix this issue and found it easier to start a new repository, which should have been unnecessary but our lack of experience and time led us down this route. We ended up linking the old repository so all commits can still be seen, yet, it was still a challenge learning how to commit and work through various branches.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of completing our first hackathons. We are a team composed entirely of newcomers who didn’t know what we were going to do for our project. We met Friday evening with absolutely no idea in mind, yet we were able to come up with an ambitious idea that was amazing to work on. In addition to this, none of us had any prior experience with Swift, but we managed to get some elements working regardless. Firebase was learned and navigated through as well, even if both ends never ended up meeting. The fact that we were able to accomplish this much in such a short amount of time while learning this new material was truly astonishing. We are proud of the progress we made and our ability to follow through on a project regardless of how ambitious the project was. In the end, we're glad we committed to the journey and exposed ourselves to many elements of app development.

What we learned

We learned that preparation is key. Before coming here, we didn’t have an idea for our project making the first few hours we had dedicated to brainstorming what we were going to do. Additionally, if we knew we were going to make an iOS app, we would have probably looked at some sort of Swift tutorials in preparation for our project. We underestimated the complexity of turning our UI into a functional app and it brought us many complications. We did not think much of it as it was our first hackathon, but now that we got exposure to what it entails, we are ready for the next one and eager to compete.

What's Next for Culinary Connections

We hope to fully flesh out this app eventually! We believe this has a lot of potential and have identified a possible user base. We think food is a truly special part of culture and the universal human experience and as such, we feel it is important to spread this magic. A lot of people find comfort in cooking and being able to meet like-minded people through food is truly something special. In just 36 hours, we managed to create a UI, a potential backend, and a skeleton of a frontend. Given more time, with our current passion, we can continue to learn Swift and turn this into a fully-fledged app that could be deployed! We can already think of potential updates such as adding the cooking lessons with a chatbot that remembers your cooking recipes and techniques. It would specialize in identifying mistakes that could occur when cooking and would work to hone a beginner's skills! We hope to continue building upon this as we hope to bring others through food while bringing ourselves new skills as well.

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