food-finer

Inspiration

With Covid-19, everyone is staying at home more than ever. Messaging apps like Telegram has become significantly important in our lives, as it keeps us connected with our friends and family even when covid-19 keeps us apart. As such, we felt it would be very appropriate for us to create a telegram bot to resolve one of the most important questions we face in our everyday lives (now, at home): What should we eat? With this bot being on telegram, it would be convenient and easy for everyone to use.

What it does

This recipe bot serves a main function of suggesting recipes to a user based on:

1. The user's time constraint - how long do they want to prepare their food for?
2. The user's fridge contents - what does the user have at home?

How we built it

We built it using python, use pandas to clean the data, mysql for the database, and put it all together on heroku.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into problems with the python and sql codes, with the need to debug here and there. We also had rethink several design aspects of the bot - such as where we should place which commands, responses, functions etc in which files. It was also quite difficult to deploy the project up to heroku.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of resolving all the challenges, slowly but surely debugging everything, and coming up with a final product that is able to serve its purpose.

What we learned

Apart from the technical skills we learnt while coding this project on python, we learnt to be patient and perseverant, trying all out all possible methods as one will surely work.

What's next for food-finer

In the future, maybe we can expand more of the functions to being able to read more than just 3 ingredients, as well as increasing the amount of recipes we have stored in the database. Perhaps we can create other user friendly functions to make the bot more interactive and helpful.

Built With

• heroku
• mysql
• pandas
• python
• telegrambot