I’m making something and it’s not a game. But it has me excited so I thought I’d share it with you. For work, the frontend team and myself are trying to delve deeper into backend programming land so that we can remove some of the bottlenecks on our very small team. To that end, we’ve been having workshops with our resident guru (shout out to Johanns!) and we’ve been building our own Rails projects to learn on. I used this opportunity to tackle a problem I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is recipe management.
Some background information first: I love to cook. Cooking is a special kind of magic. The recipes that I use are all over the place. Probably 50% of the YouTube content I watch is cooking videos. I have a ton of cookbooks. Despite not loving the user experience, I use Pinterest which is great for its vision board approach. (I’m definitely a visual learner. And I can’t stand cookbooks without pictures. How do you know if you want to cook it without a picture?) I also have a ton of cooking magazines that I’d really like to scrape for quality recipes and then reclaim my shelf space. And that doesn’t count a barrage of loose handwritten or printed paper recipes and random links that currently I just store in Pocket. I want one source of information. Because everytime I make something bomb and think about making it again I have to remember where the hell it came from.
So my app is a bit of a recipe catalog, with the ability to group recipes into books for categorization. It’s tentatively called Chef Shelf. (And no, I don’t have the honor of being a trained chef, but who can resist the consonance.) So I’ve been wrangling database tables and trying to get more comfortable with Ruby mainly because I want to be a (more) badass developer, but also because I’ve got this problem that needs solving. My end goal is to put this bad boy on a spare raspberry pi I got for Christmas a couple years back and serve it throughout my apartment, but we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll make it go farther. I haven’t built it for multiple users because I don’t want to put the cart before the horse, and right now I’m having fun! I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m spending entire evenings scratching my head and shaking my fist at Stack Overflow (note to self: write post about the toxicity of Stack Overflow) just to solve some tiny problem but that’s how you learn, right? I’ll share some photos down the line.
Oh, and fear not, I’m still working on Fair Weather and contemplating my next game project (more on that later). So as usual I’m keeping several plates spinning over here. I’d better get back to it!