NewChef

Inspiration

Cooking is an experience that lights a little spark of adventure in each of us. I fell in love with cooking for the same reasons as I did coding. A creative science improved through practice, performed for the enjoyment of the others. Like coding, it's incredibly discouraging to begin. Much is unknown, and learning feels intimidating. This project was designed to encourage others to explore their love of cooking, and hopefully give a clear path towards breaking down that barrier and falling in love with one of the most rewarding pass times out there.

What it does

NewChef is a website designed to give new cooks a starting direction towards learning the style of cooking their most interested in. Visitors may select the topic they are most interested in, and are given a weeks worth of recipes from that category to help them learn and develop their skills.

How I built it

The application is a web app built using React. The recipes are pulled by connecting to the public API, Tasty.

Challenges I ran into

• Finding a public recipe API that let you retrieve recipes from the specific categories relevant to my application was difficult. I originally built the application to work with the Yummly API, but it was down during my development and I had to pivot directions.
• Creating the carousel for recipes to let users cycle through was a challenge. It involved balancing async operations that conflicted, but it was worth it to avoid creating duplicate requests.
• Designing the wave using CSS on the home page was a challenge, and something I've been wanting to try for a long time. I really enjoyed working on that part of the website as well.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• This was my first time competing in a hackathon solo! I am really excited about what I was able to build and accomplish in the time I was given.
• I really loved working on a project that combined two of the things I'm most passionate about.
• I'm really happy I chose to go the API route for recipe population! I want the application to be scalable beyond just one-week of recipes for each category. Pulling data makes it as easy as changing a variable to increase how many recipes a user can work through.

What I learned

This was the first time I've used SVGs in my page designing. It was also the first time I've worked with a public API. Both were great learning experiences!

What's next for NewChef

I plan to continue working on this project outside of the hackathon! My next goals will be to create user accounts and to allow users to keep track of what recipes they've completed. The goal will be to create a larger sense of achievement while using the application!

Built With

• react
• tastyapi