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Recipeasy!

Our Inspiration: Our common passion for accessibility and health is what brought us together. Cooking can be challenging for everyone, be it the lack of time, money, or even just motivation. Between 30% and 40% of food in the U.S. is thrown out or wasted each year and is another struggle we all experience. Reducing the amount of food thrown out is an aspect of our lives we wanted to improve with this project. Thus, Recipeasy was born! A website that suggests recipes based on ingredients a user may already have lying around would be extremely useful for solving these problems!

Our Process: We started off with half of our team working on gathering data with the Spoonacular API, while the other half worked on implementing Vercel and the frontend design of the website. Our front end was coded in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. We worked very efficiently and delegated tasks to each of our strengths. Once all of us finished our main tasks, we combined all our individual contributions and worked together on connecting the back end with the front end. We did this by fetching information from either side and providing information as needed. Our main emphasis was on learning about the process at different levels of abstraction, as we all came into this hackathon as beginners with a thirst to learn. The mentors and workshops available at HackUCI were extremely helpful to us in this regard. Our organized approach helped us execute our tasks efficiently. Once we had the main functionality, we all discussed, planned, and coded the aesthetic aspects of the UI. We also tested edge cases and added some more functionality with the bit of extra time we had. This included tags for dietary restrictions for each recipe and a no results” window for invalid user inputs.

What We Learned: We all learned a lot while working on this project. Most of us had beginner-level to no experience in web development, but we all had the motivation to learn. We powered through understanding Vercel and Express.js documentation and had some issues bridging our frontend and backend. We had some issues with some of the UI and CSS coding, but overall we are really proud of what we have made in this short time! We all come from very different backgrounds and our prior skill sets really integrated together well. We spent the entire hackathon teaching each other and reexplaining every step as we worked through the project. We all feel much more confident in our web development skills, even the parts that we individually didn’t work on. Overall, this was an incredibly valuable experience. We all learned a lot and had the opportunity to create something that we are proud of and believe in! :)

What's next for Recipeasy

We would like to implement filters for finding particular cuisines, cooking time, budget, and difficulty. We would love to incorporate more accessibility, such as built-in text-to-voice. For a grand plan, we would love to enable weekly meal planning or potentially have users review and save the recipes they have tried and enjoyed.