Saponaid

Inspiration

I learned to make soap recently at my local makerspace. I've also been interesting in herbalism for a while as well and I figured the combination of interest could make me into a decent soap maker.
Having worked in the Tech space for 10+ years, I figured I could build a new tool to help myself and other make soap and bring new, useful features to the application.

Allows users to create soap recipes
Allows users to track recipe trials. Keeping a journal of your processes and understanding the result of a batch is important to continue improving your recipes. This feature requires a user to be logged in.
Allows users to compare oils and fats to analyze the qualities they provide. This helps a user pick specific oils for their soap.
Provides Lye calculations, fatty acid breakdown and superfatting.
Allows users to gain recipe inspiration from others in a familiar social media feed.

I used Bolt primarily for the application.
Bolt was able to get some basic data for a few oils/fats but I needed to do more of a deep dive to cross reference and format the data so it was easy for Bolt to import. (JSON file with validated values -> Migration -> Supabase)

There were issues with validating the oil and fat data. As of now, I've audited and cross referenced different values from different calculators. In addition, there is an "About" section which talks more about the sources of information.
There we're some minor UI/UX issues but Bolt makes resolving these pretty easy.
There is no way (yet) to add new oil information into the database. During the next data audit, I will include new oils by manually running a migration to add them. In the future, we may automate this process or at least build a feature to do this in a UI to avoid data input issues.
The information may be overwhelming to a newcomer so it may be helpful to add some supporting information in another part of the application to help understand the core of soap making.

Actually finishing and shipping a product.
Building something that I will enjoy using.
The UI/UX is done really well(by my standards...).
Getting a full application done in about a week. Applications like Bolt are definitely a game changer for everyone wanting to build an application.
Building an application that can be impactful to others.

Patience, you have to be patient to build an application with AI assistance. You also may need to do somethings for yourself. If you don't already have knowledge of full-stack web development, use the time as an opportunity to learn some different concepts. Have AI teach you along the way.
This was my first time wrangling data for a real project(Outside of Kaggle, Datacamp, Etc) so there is definitely an element of data cleaning and validation needed here. If you want to be more efficient, building a data pipeline could be useful. Luckily, this type of data doesn't change much.
Make sure you run an audit of your application (npm run audit in this case). Have AI help you remediate and potential security vulnerabilities. Also make sure to build automated testing or just run through extensive flow testing yourself.

Continue UI/UX improvements.
Expand on social features.
Build a "getting started" page to help newcomers get familiar with the soap making process.
Add new oils/fats and validate the existing ones.
Continue to keep the application update because of new vulnerabilities that continue to surface.

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