UNC Coding Bootcamp: Project One.
The goal of this project was to combine all of the skills we have gathered so far in our Coding Bootcamp course and collaborate with our classmates to create an application using Agile development practices. We designed this project from the ground up, creating the idea together and distributing responsibilities based on our individual strengths. This application, called "Meal Maker," uses server side APIs to generate food and drink recipes based on user input. The current live application reflects the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for Meal Maker.
Alex Chen (GitHub: https://github.com/awchen85) David Dowell (GitHub:https://github.com/DavidDowell ) Mitchell Armstrong (GitHub: https://github.com/ScarElite) Patrick MacDonald (GitHub: https://github.com/pmacdonald07)
JQuery JQuery UI Bulma CSS framework Spoonacular API TheCocktailDB API GitHub
The user story for Meal Maker: "As someone who loves to eat and cook, I would like to use an application that generates food and drink recipes based on my criteria, so that I can choose a recipe that appeals to me without having to scour the internet."
Our application functions by taking user search criteria, including diet restrictions, and making API calls to Spoonacular (for food recipes) and TheCocktailDB (for a random drink recipe if the user wants a drink). Once we have the data from each, we dynamically generate cards that have basic information about several recipes, including an image that users can click to visit the original recipe url. Users can also click a "Favorite" button to save recipes they like into local storage. These recipes will reappear when the user refreshes the page.
There were a number of features we wanted to add to our application but could not due to either time constraints or limitations of each server side API. We hope that we can revisit these features, or even collaborate with other developers to truly make Meal Maker shine. Some of our future goals include:
Giving the user the option to generate a new set of recipe options based on the same criteria.
Utilizing drag and drop functionality to allow users to drag recipes they like into a "Favorite Recipes" column. These recipes would be saved into local storage and cards would automatically generate upon refreshing the page.
Including a meal planner feature where users could drag recipes into a calendar so they can save recipes they want to make at a later date, or throughout the week.
Utilize another server side API, such as Kroger's API, that would allow us to generate a price list for each recipe's ingredients and even generate a shopping cart filled with those ingredients.
Our humble hope for other up-and-coming developers who view our work is that our project can serve as an example of how to use third party APIs, server-side APIs, local storage, and dynamically generated content. We also hope that our project can further act as a vehicle for each of us to learn from more experienced developers who could help us achieve our goals of creating the features listed above (or even features we haven't imagined!). We would also love to learn how to optimize the code we've created so it is more efficient and better for the user.
This project has served as an excellent opportunity for each of us to practice our coding skills using the tools listed above. Most importantly, we gained the opportunity to work collaboratively with other developers. We communicated every day using Slack, and had several meetups outside of class using Zoom so that we could code simultaneously. The practice we had using GitHub and simulating a real-world work environment was invaluable. Each of us agrees this was the most important and rewarding aspect of this project.
https://github.com/pmacdonald07/Meal-Maker.git https://pmacdonald07.github.io/Meal-Maker/
Thank you for taking the time to view our work.
Sincerely, Alex David Mitchell Patrick