Inspiration
My boyfriend always complains about how difficult he finds it to plan out healthy meals each week and then when he's finally done it he always ends up forgetting things when shopping. It's an unnecessary stressor and them little bits of time wasted make all the difference. I wanted to make something that could help him out, and probably many other people.
What it does
Meals Made Easy allows the user to search up ingredients or a meal they like and select one from the options given to add to their meal plan. Once it is attached to their meal plan they can view the ingredients and instructions for the recipe, all the ingredients are also automatically inserted into a grocery list. Being able to search up a recipe and instantly have a grocery list for it reduces the stress of forgetting things when shopping and makes it easier to think of recipes.
How we built it
The backend for the webapp was created using Flask as from research I found it has the smallest learning curve of the popular Python backend libraries and I am not very familiar with backend work. I used the APINinjas Recipe API to search for recipes, there are over 200,000 recipes available via this API so would be able to suit everyones food tastes. HTML, CSS and some JS was used to create the frontend of the webapp.
Challenges we ran into
The backend development was difficult, I had issues trying to format things correctly and as I started from a CLI (which ended up being a mistake) I had to correct a lot of logic, slowing the process down.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm proud that I've managed to create a program with a backend completely solo for the first time.
What we learned
I learned that trying new things can be fun and that backend development isn't as scary as I thought it would be.
What's next for Meals Made Easy
The next step would be to create a web scraper or find an API that compared the prices for the users grocery list between different supermarkets so the user could find the best deals available to them. I would also like to add a database so users could have a login and not necessarily need to complete their meal plan in one go, using a database could also allow users to save favourite meals for easy access.
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