Inspiration
Never begin a hackathon on an empty stomach! What you get is 24 hours of work because of your mid-day cravings. We all love to cook and eat delicious food. We wanted to channel our love for cooking and our dislike of making hard decisions and eventually came to this project idea.
What it does
Our intention for this application was to take in all the ingredients you had at your disposal and give you recipes that needed only what you had. Unfortunately, the outcome was a very sparse and uninspiring collection of recipes. That's why our revised prototype is centered around a main ingredient and a large variety of different meals. We created a web scraping script that would go through various websites to find the best recipes for your ingredient and list it out all for you.
How we built it
We ran a web server with: HTML/CSS, Node.js, Express.js, neDB, and puppeteer in Javascript.
Challenges we ran into
Our team was very young in our knowledge of software development and computer science. One of our members is even an animal science major with no prior experience but a lot of enthusiasm to learn! We all did our part in learning HTML/CSS and Javascript, all for the first time. Our back end servers were a large obstacle that hindered progress for a bit. We encountered countless network errors and multiple changes in our stack. We persevered through the night and got no sleep but we eventually came out with a product that we're proud of.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
For the first time ever, we were able to complete a project that we can share with the entire world through the web! Learning different design and styling techniques with CSS was a joy and overcoming the learning curve of back end design preps us for bigger projects in the future. We shared our entire journey through a twitch livestream where we found unexpected help and friends from all the way across the globe!
What we learned
Aside from all the technical skills we obtained, we learned a valuable lesson in commitment and perseverance. There were many doubts, especially late at night, but our willpower, teamwork, and lots of coffee helped us push through and teach us that we can accomplish our goals if we put our minds to it.
What's next for SnackHacks
Hopefully, we can expand the ingredients list and make it more efficient. Though we don't believe it should be a commercial product, it is definitely something worth sharing with others.
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