myEats: a grocery inventory/recipe search tool

This project was created during the QHacks 2017 hackathon. myEats is designed to make it easier to track which food you have at home and to find new recipes to cook with the things you have on hand.

It keeps a list of the items you have on hand, with sliders for each item to keep track of how much you have left. When you finish an item you can delete it from the list. We also built in a (beautiful) recipe search that lets users search a database of over 1.5 million recipes via the Edamam API.

I built this together with my friends Deven, Marissa, and Emma. The app was built with NodeJS, Express, Knockout and a sprinkling of jQuery. The persistence layer was CouchDB.

We started this project by planning for several hours what features we would like to see in the app - as well as how we would like users to interact with it. Once we had settled on our initial concept we fleshed out some features on a kanban board, assigned tasks, and went off. The hackathon itself was designed to be an all-night type hackathon.

The first night of coding finished and we had fleshed out the individual components of the application. I had set up and configured a database service layer for the application. Deven, Marissa, and Emma had each taken on their own roles in the development cycle with Deven handling the front end viewmodels and knockout templates, Marissa managing the CSS and creating a great flexbox layout, and Emma designing and creating the user interface.

The second night was spent further improving and polishing up the user interface. We stopped development midway through the night to put our current build up on the projector and run through a “demo” of the features. During the demo we noticed many things that needed to be fixed

• colours on the page being too similar causing confusion, bugs, missing features, etc.

After reviewing the list of improvements to make we got back to work. After 24+ hours of continuous programming we managed to finish the application minutes before the deadline. The code for this project is available on GitLab

Next Steps

We were planning to implement an OCR type scanner into the app to allow users to “scan” their grocery receipts and automatically input all of the purchased items into the app. We would have liked to implement this feature, but didn’t end up having enough time. Perhaps this can be added after the fact on a weekend some day.