Diet Helper | Devpost

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Inspiration

Our team knew before we started making the project that we wanted to create a web-app to practice front-end and back-end web development. Wracking our brains on issues we can tackle in the medical field brought us to the attention of diets. Most of us being fresh college students are experiencing cooking on our own for the first time and many of us rely on recipes to craft our fine dishes. We then thought it would be quite convenient to have one singular website for finding all recipe suggestions instead of going out recipe hunting on our own.

What it does

Diet Helper, as the name suggests, helps people when they are on a diet, regardless of it being medically-prescribed or for personal health reasons. This web-app allows the user to discover multiple recipes for certain diets, all in one place! They can restrict certain ingredients to their liking.

How we built it

It started with interviewing a range of people. This helped uncover a common user pain point when it came to cooking from a recipe: needing to figure out one unit of measurement to another for ingredients. A few possible web-app layouts were drafted in order to maximize the user experience.

After the sketches and ideas were rounded out, we started on the coding stage. We decided to use Javascript and React as the front-end language as well as the good ole html and css. In the midst of coming up with a database for the recipes, we stumbled upon the Edamam API. The API contains millions of recipes along with dietary restriction tags as filters.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenges we ran into was linking the front-end and the back-end together. None of us has had much of a website development experience, so we were all struggling in figuring out how to connect the pieces to finish this project. For some of us, this was also our first time working with javascript.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making a working product with javascript for the first time for some of us. We are also proud of making a working website with our first go.

What's next for Diet Helper

We know the pains of coming across measuring units we do not have in recipes, so we plan on adding a built in unit converter onto the web-app. We have already written the code logic which could be found on our github, but have not yet polished it and implemented it.