pawsome

pawsome calculates your dog's exact daily nutrient needs, then tells you what to add to what's already in your fridge — or builds a full recipe from scratch. Real vet nutrition science, not guesswork.

Comment

Inspiration

I have a 5-year old Golden Retriever. I would like him to have fresh and balanced homemade meals to live long and healthily. Sometimes I'd like to make the food from what I already have (e.g. extra piece of chicken breast from the package), and other times I'd like to explore creative recipes so that he can taste more interesting flavors. I created pawsome to serve both needs, based on explainable formula and official nutrition guidelines.

What it does

A user can input the dogs age, weight, and activity level, and get dog food recipe recommendations. One mode is to start from what the user already has, and the recommendation would add items that are missing. Another mode is to start from scratch, and recommend affordable and creative recipes.

How we built it

I used Codex from start to finish.

Challenges we ran into

  1. The v1 of the website already looked nice, but it seemed to have used a mixture of templates, and a few of the modes don't fit together. For example, the recipe creation step is both rendered as a layover and a seemingly clickable step navigator. The latter doesn't work.
  2. The computation of nutrition and portions took a few iterations. For example, it says my Bento needs 1405mg calcium everyday, and it always recommends a calcium supplement of that amount, completely ignoring the calcium from the food itself.
  3. It wasn't good enough about removing potentially toxic items, e.g. onions, until explicitly told so.
  4. The website UI took many iterations even though it looks simple. In many cases, it creates fields that look clickable, but do no lead to anything.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The website is good looking and the recipe suggestion is functioning! Bento and I are beta-testing the recipes!

What we learned

In retrospect, I think the building process would've been more smooth if I gave more guidelines in the initial prompt, including safety flags, UI style, etc. If this has scaled adoption, I would like it to be a phone app, with saved recipes for each user-dog profile.

What's next for pawsome

Built With

Share this project:

Updates