miso - recipes & cookbook app

Miso app is a cozy home for your favorite recipes. Keep your grandma's pierogi recipe safe and quickly share with friends. Convert photos to recipes, save to cookbooks & shopping lists in one click.

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Inspiration

Ever since I learned how to code (6 years ago), I had a dream to create a cookbook app. Cooking is one of those small daily joy things for me. Recipes & shopping lists have always been chaos: a link in a group chat, a screenshot from Instagram, a crumpled note, a 10,000-word blog post with a generational life story you have to scroll through before getting to the ingredients. I wanted a single place where I can safely keep recipes I gather over my lifetime, while also being able to simply access ingredient list when I'm rushing through a grocery store.

What it does

Miso is a recipe cookbook:

  • Get inspired with great, verified recipes. No decision fatigue with 1000+ different bolognese recipes; just a few for each occasion: quick, authentic, healthy.
  • Create your own structured recipes that allow browsing by ingredient and creating shopping lists with a single click. You can publish your recipes to be seen by everyone (once an admin verifies it). Otherwise the your recipes appear only for you, but can still be shared by a link.
  • Import recipes by pasting freeform text or taking a picture. Miso will transform it into a structured recipe.
  • Search recipes by name and filter by cuisine, dietary tags and ingredients.
  • Set metric/imperial unit preferences so recipes feel natural in your kitchen, and simply convert without googling or a calculator.
  • Share recipes with friends via links, even if they don’t have the app installed.
  • Keep saved recipes available offline (so you can cook & shop for ingredients without internet).
  • Miso preserves source links and author attribution. Users can always tap through to the original for detailed technique explanations or video.

How I built it

Miso is a cross platform iOS + Android app.

  • Mobile: Kotlin Multiplatform + Compose Multiplatform
  • Backend: Ktor server, Exposed ORM, PostgreSQL.
  • Offline: SQLDelight caching for saved recipes.
  • Quality: Spotless/ktlint, Detekt, and tests (unit + Robolectric + Roborazzi snapshots)

Challenges I ran into

  • Getting structured recipes right: Ingredients, units, scaling, and rounding are tricky to get right, while keeping recipes flexible.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Creating my dream app MVP (finally!)

What I learned

  • Closing the agentic loop with reliable and fast running tests, linting and static analysis is key for getting the most out of AI coding.
  • SKILLS.md and AGENTS.md helped to keep the codebase consistent even when changing a lot of code in a single agent task.
  • Prioritization is extremely important when shipping an MVP; I've spent way too much time on polishing little details.

What's next for miso - recipes & cookbook app

Short term

  • Recipe thumbnail upload
  • Export your cookbook: with miso, there is no lock-in. Download all your recipes anytime.
  • Print recipe in a nice PDF format
  • Fork (i.e. copy) any recipe and adapt it to you liking.
  • Build initial ingredient and recipe database.
  • A simple classifier to disallow submitting spam submissions for human review.
  • Support ingredient substitutions and ingredient ranges (e.g. 100-200ml water)
  • Vanity links
  • Import recipe from URL
  • Initial release!

Longer term

  • Robust recipe versioning. Once recipe is added to the cookbook, it must never disappear; even if author updates the content.
  • Community features (upvoting, downvoting, comments, following other users)
  • Recipe translations
  • Video link to recipe conversion

Built With

  • claudecode
  • compose
  • flyway
  • kotlin
  • ktor
  • multiplatform
  • postgresql
  • railway
  • sqldelight
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