I quit my job, took up cooking as a hobby and built a Meal Planning app
Around the middle of this year I quit my decently paid, high stress SWE job so I could spend some downtime doing things that make me happy. I did some travelling, both interstate and abroad, spent time working on projects around the house, did some gardening and took up cooking as a hobby. While cooking, I found that most of the apps already out there that focused on meal planning and recipe/shopping list management didn't quite work out how I wanted them to. Some would only work on limited devices, or bombarded me with pointless social features, or they didn't allow importing external…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Around the middle of this year I quit my decently paid, high stress SWE job so I could spend some downtime doing things that make me happy. I did some travelling, both interstate and abroad, spent time working on projects around the house, did some gardening and took up cooking as a hobby. While cooking, I found that most of the apps already out there that focused on meal planning and recipe/shopping list management didn't quite work out how I wanted them to. Some would only work on limited devices, or bombarded me with pointless social features, or they didn't allow importing external recipes, didn't include shopping list functionality, didn't scale recipes or convert measurements between metric/imperial, or they locked key features behind subscriptions. So I built Tasty Bites in my (now ample) free time. Tech used: - Symfony/Api-Platform in the backend. Not glamorous, but I'd worked with it before and knew it could get the job done. - Angular with bootstrap in the frontend. Angular is nice and the built in PWA/SW features are top notch. About half way through I wished I had used Tailwind instead of bootstrap. - Deployed to a medium ec2 instance and RDS postgres db. RDS in particular is quite expensive, but the free tier and AWS credits help. I used GitHub Actions to build the CI/CD pipeline. - The app is available as an installable PWA that should work on any device (albeit with some issues on ios 17 due to some issues in webkit (https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/50378) I've also deployed to the Microsoft Store and Play Store using the bundlers from PWAbuilder (https://www.pwabuilder.com/) which was a surprisingly easy experience. Building an ios app from the PWA is the next step, PWABuilder offers a bundler but the process looks a lot more involved and the approval process seems to be a bit hit and miss for packaged PWA's. (If anyone has any insight here, it would be much appreciated) Things to improve: - The recipe scraper is about 80-90% okay, but could be improved. I think a LLM based approach could yield better results, albeit at a higher price point. - Integration with grocery shops is limited to Woolworths (Australia, where I'm based). It's a shame that most grocery suppliers don't provide an API for converting a shopping list to a cart. - The interface is still a little clunky in places.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- 7T7courses, the recipe manager.2011 · ▲23
I am happy to announce the updated release of my web app, 7courses. http://7courses.com/ 7courses makes it ridiculously easy to jot down and manage your collection of recipes. As someone who cooks, I often find recipes online or in cookbooks, but have no way to organize them. I have been looking for a digital "recipe box". After plenty of searching I just made my own. 7courses was built around the idea that you should be able to choose how you want to organize your recipes, and doing so should be easy and quick. The UI is responsive and intuitive, with a no frills design. Just jump right in…
- IMI made an app to make meal planning easy2024 · simplechore.xyz · ▲9
My free to use app lets you schedule your favorite recipes with a few clicks
- YPyour personal, self-built productivity tool2013 · ▲21
Care to share a screenshot and the 'killer feature' of any of your personal, self-built productivity tools? eg. I made my own calendar and money-tracker last year - there are no other users, it makes no money, I have no plans to make it public, but it holds my life together :) http://i.imgur.com/h2keJDg.png GREAT BECAUSE... it tells me how much I'm going to get paid this month. Absolutely no ulterior motive here (ie. I'm not canvassing opinions for a productivity app startup or anything), just interested.
- ADAnother Darn To-Do List App2022 · anotherdarntodo.com · ▲5
Hi guys, This is my first time building something from scratch so go easy on me. I've always used to-do lists to keep me productive and stave off anxiety (not sure why they work so well for me but they do). I get kinda annoyed at the to-do list apps on the app stores because they move tasks to the bottom of the list when you tick them off. Some people may like that, but it annoys the shit out of me, because I like to feel a sense of progression as I go down through the list over the course of the day. So this was borne out of my frustration really. I also made it browser-based so it's easy…
- IMI made recipes app, so you don't waste your food ingredients2024 · easycook.app · ▲5
Hello everyone, I created a EasyCook app, this app will generate food recipes based on your ingredients. The idea is not to waste food, and if you have left some ingredients in the Kitchen, you can write it down in app and get a recipe based on these ingredients. The app is free to use, however have more features available for paid users. Would be thankful for feedback, so I can improve the app more!
- IBI built a random meal plan generator to help my wife2024 · platepickers.com · ▲5
Hi HN! I built this tool for my wife to save her the headache of meal planning. She finds it helpful and I think you might too. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts. Thanks!
More work this month
the category →
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Launched alongside, December 2023
the whole month →- BM
Hi HN! I’m proud to share that we have built a real 3rd party iMessage client for Android. We did it by reverse engineering the iMessage protocol and encryption system. It's available to download today (no waitlist): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beeper.ima and there's a technical writeup here: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works. Unlike every other attempt to build an iMessage app for Android (including our first gen app), Beeper Mini does not use a Mac server relay in the cloud. The app connects directly to Apple…
Commerce · 2023 · beeper.com
- HA
Hey! I made Heynote entirely for my own use case. For many years, I always had an Emacs instance running with the scratch buffer open, even long after I had abandoned Emacs as my programming editor in favor of more recent IDE:s. The simplicity of having just one big scratch buffer appeals to me, but I still want to separate the different things I jot down somehow (without using tabs or similar). Previously, my solution was to insert a bunch of blank lines between the notes, but hitting C-A would still select the entire buffer. That's why I came up with the concept of "blocks", which turned…
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