Want to cook but don't know where to start? Use our web app to provide what ingredients you have available and get some recipes recommended for you to try! Check out https://devpost.com/software/re-recipes.
In a world increasingly dominated by food delivery, we recognized the need to promote homecooked meals. Our inspiration for Re:Recipes stems from a desire to encourage healthier eating habits while also decreasing the amount of excessive food waste.
Re:Recipes takes in the ingredients the user has that are readily available, and the platform provides the user with recipe recommendations that incorporate the given ingredients. By facilitating home cooking and encouraging the usage of extra ingredients lying around, our platform not only promotes healthier lifestyles but also aims to reduce each user's environmental footprint.
The project is built using Python's Flask web framework, allowing for seamless interaction with users, along with HTML, CSS (Bootstrap), and JavaScript. We also utilized Supabase, a robust backend service, to store and retrieve recipe data efficiently. This online API was used to generate and store our current set of data for the recipes. The integration of Supabase enables rapid data retrieval based on user-inputted ingredients, ensuring a quick and personalized recipe recommendation process. The backend and server calls were mainly programmed using JavaScript.
With each of us having little experience in hackathons and meeting for the first time, it took us a few hours to get to know each other, establish what we wanted to build, what to build with, and install all the tools we wanted to use before actually starting to code the project. The need to learn while programming a project within a time limit dramatically increased our stress and drained our energy quickly.
First and foremost, we are all incredibly proud of the fact that, well, we did it! We successfully created a functioning product that we could share with the judges of this incredible hackathon, after hours of typing away on Visual Studio Code, learning new frameworks and technologies, and struggling in unison to fix bugs in our program. We had high hopes for what we could accomplish in this 24-hour hackathon, and while not all of our aspirations came to fruition, we can all confidently say that, for our first hackathon, we worked pretty well together!
Building Re:Recipes taught us valuable lessons in web development and database management. We gained insights into creating an effective recommendation system and creating a visually appealing and responsive user interface. Working with Supabase enhanced our understanding of utilizing powerful backend tools to streamline data operations. As first-time hackers, not only did we gain valuable experience working with APIs and frameworks, but we also learned about the challenges that come with programming as a team with a tight schedule. Quick decision-making and ability to compromise for the benefit of the team proved to be imperative in progressing the project, and overall in building a hack that we can all be proud of!
We were able to create a basic recipe-finding tool that filters through a database to give the user recommendations. With more time to ideate and program, and with more experience in the field of machine learning, we envision that Re:Recipes can make use of powerful machine learning and querying models to give users personalized recipe recommendations. In the future, our users would be able to save their history of enjoyed recipes and cuisine, and pull recipes from a much larger database, to give users a variety of culinary journeys that they're sure to enjoy! All in all, we hope to grow Re:Recipes into an efficient assistant in the kitchen, with one goal in mind: to bring the fun back into home cooking!