Weekly Plates

Want to lose or gain weight but tired of eating the same foods everyday? Want to start eating a healthier but delicious diet? Try out Weekly Plate for a unique, customized meal plan every week!

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Inspiration

Everyone in our group has a passion for healthy eating, and so once we found out that we could create any project, we spent some time brainstorming and quickly came up with this idea. We know it can be hard to plan out meal plans for the week ahead and decided to try and come up with an easily customizable and responsive website capable of assisting the user. That is how our team came up with the idea for weekly plates.

What it does

This project currently takes in how many calories per day the user wants to consume and outputs a table showing suggested meals for the user to eat throughout the week.

How we built it

We used a lot of technologies new to our team throughout this project. We had a team of two working on the front-end using react and javascript. The other two of us worked on the back-end. One used java and java servlets to do the computing required to get our project to work and got our back-end to talk to the front-end. The other created a Google Cloud-based SQL database, populated it with our foods and ingredients, and created the virtual machine that everything ran on.

Challenges we ran into

The majority of our team is working out of Georgia, and managing the time difference has been a real hassle. Not only that, but we have been experiencing tornados throughout the hackathon that took our power out for three hours. Needless to say, this has been an extraordinarily unique experience. We also faced many technical challenges. Among these was trying to use Google Cloud to host everything for a team without any Google Cloud experience.

What I learned

Our team learned a lot. For all of us, this is our first hackathon, and (perhaps out of pride) we decided to avoid getting a mentor. It turns out we could have used one. Nevertheless, we managed to get a lot out of this hackathon, and I think we did fairly well. Drew got a lot of experience creating a front-end interface using react and javascript. Tyler learned how to use the Google Cloud Suite and create a MySQL database that talked to a Google virtual machine. Dhruv learned how to do java back-end and communicate with the front-end using servlets. Overall, the project has been an incredibly educational experience, and we are happy to have it as our team's first hackathon experience.

What's next for Weekly Plates

We were a bit overzealous when we first came up with the idea for this project. As such, it is clear where we want to take weekly plates going into the future. We hope to expand our database of foods and ingredients by taking advantage of already available data. We also want to add options for the user to control their macronutrient intake and eventually provide cost estimation and cheap meal plan creation for people who don't have enough money to sustain an expensive meal plan but still want to eat healthily.

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