Inspiration

As a student living independently in an apartment, I sometimes skip breakfast or lunch because I do not feel like cooking, do not have much of an appetite, or am trying to save money. I sometimes end up with a stomachache from being hungry. Cooking takes time, while eating out every day can be expensive or make it difficult to find food I enjoy. I realized that this is not an uncommon problem, so I wanted to create a tool that could help people plan meals, eat more regularly, and make choosing food feel easier.

What We Built

My team and I used Java to build Daily Menu, a desktop concept demo for meal planning and recipe discovery. The app brings together features such as planning meals, exploring recipe suggestions, and organizing a daily menu.

Challenges

Because we had limited experience working on software as a team, we spent a lot of time deciding which features to include and how the user interface should look. This left us with less time than we had hoped to implement some of our larger ideas. We had to focus on our priorities, but we successfully completed the concept demo.

What I Learned

Through this project, I gained an initial understanding of how to build software collaboratively rather than working alone. I learned that teamwork involves more than writing code: it also requires discussing ideas, making design decisions together, and coordinating our work. I believe this experience will help us take on larger projects in the future.

What's Next

I hope we can eventually bring Daily Menu to mobile devices and turn the concept demo into a practical Android app, with an installable APK as the final result.