OptiMeal

Inspiration

• We wanted to create a project that would help us in our everyday lives since we have been tired of not knowing what we wanted to eat for our next meal, and we want to stay healthy and not eat out at restaurants often. A lot of thought goes into planning out a week's worth of meals while simultaneously trying to balance your macronutrient intake, so we created this app to streamline and automate this process for our own personal use.

What it does

• OptiMeal generates 21 unique meals for a week by pulling from a browsable recipe database with filters for dietary restrictions, cuisines, and macronutrient targets. Users can view each recipe to learn more about macros, the ingredients used to make it (in order to compile a shopping list), and the steps to making it.

How we built it

• We built it using the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js) and the Spoonacular API to pull ingredients, recipes, and pricing data. We used Axios for the front-end API, Express.js for the back-end, and Nginx as a web server to help us deploy our website on an AWS instance. We also got a custom .tech domain for our website, at optimeal.tech.
  

Challenges we ran into

• SSHing on the school wi-fi was not working, so we had to work around the issue using our team member's mobile hotspot.
• We stepped out of our comfort zone to work on this website as two of our group members had never done anything related to web development before. We all learned to work with React and Express as a result.
• We also had trouble with dividing up tasks in a parallelizable fashion so as to maximize our development efficiency, given the time constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• With a lot of time, patience, and quality detail-oriented work, we developed a sleek, clean-looking website that we are incredibly proud of. We are proud of developing a solution to a problem that we have always found tedious.

What we learned

• We learned to prioritize major tasks first instead of being nit-picky and tunnel-visioned on small details, as we have learned that it can take up a lot of time that we cannot afford.
• We learned that we should try and research a lot more before a hackathon so that we arrive at a clear plan.

What's next for OptiMeal

• We want to be able to add more cuisines and dietary restrictions and add more macronutrient information for users who would be interested.
• We want to integrate our website with a local grocery store API so we can give our users real-time pricing information on the recipes that they choose.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• axios
• express.js
• javascript
• mern
• mongodb
• node.js
• npm
• python
• react
• react.js
• spoonacular