Manoa Student Kitchen

Why Manoa Student Kitchen?

College students are often extremely busy, and as such, lack the time to cook elaborate meals. There are also those for whom cooking their own meals is too expensive or difficult. This is the problem that Manoa Student Kitchen aims to help solve.

Manoa Student Kitchen is an application that allows students at UH Manoa to share their simple recipes with others that are both affordable and easy to make (requiring no more than a toaster oven). Students who may know a few simple recipes, even if they lack the time to make them themselves, would be able to share them with others who may be looking for something simple and easy to cook up. As keeping costs down is an important part of college life, the app aims to inform students of the cost of each ingredient, as well as of the ideal location to obtain it.

The Features

As mentioned above students will be able to submit their own recipes to the application. The recipes will then show up when searched for by tag or by recipe name.

Inspired by Steam tags, the application has a feature allowing users to tag a recipe with a label like “dessert”, or “cheap”, which helps in the searching process. The most common tags are deemed “popular tags” and appear in a random selection at the bottom of the homepage. In addition, recipes with the most tags appear as “popular recipes” on the homepage.

In addition, users will be able to maintain a profile of their recipes as well as edit their own recipes. Finally, certain users have administrator access, through which they are able to view any recipe, tag, or user on the site as well as delete them upon detected abuse.

For more information about the application and its features, click here to go to the github.io website.

My Contribution

I worked in a group with 2 other students on this project. Although towards the beginning of the development process my contributions were less apparent, focusing mostly on the homepage and related functions, once the format of the Recipe, Ingredient, and Location collections were decided on and implemented, I took the lead in implementing the application’s functionality. Because I have prior experience with web development, particularly in that I know what to look for and how to test when things go wrong, this turned out to be the ideal role for me in the group. My main contribution here was to the Create Recipe page, where I put together a dynamic form that including both dropdown menus loaded from the database, as well as a system to reactively set and store a preview of an image that has been uploaded. A large portion of the helper functions throughout the application ended up being based on the functions on this page and the home page.

It was helpful to be working in a group on a number of levels. For one thing, as implied by the caption above, had I been working alone, the application would probably have had a lot of trouble with making the user interface, especially in making one that looks nice. Fortunately, my group members were much more attuned to ui design principles than I am, and so I was able to focus more on the functional aspects of the application.

What I learned

This was the first larger coding project that I worked on in a group. As such it was a learning experience. On one hand, having to manage various branches and avoid conflicts turned out to be less of a problem than I thought it would be. On the other hand, there were moments when I felt like I should be doing more but have to wait for other features to be implemented before continuing. In the end, I admit that the ‘vertical development’ attitude that we tried to approach the applciation from fell through, and I ended up contributing more to the functionality with helper functions and reactive variables while my group members built most of the UI.

A valuable lesson that I learned was when to let go of a desired feature and take a different approach. This occured in my attempt to implement an imgur api. I was able to implement almost everything successfully. The image got submitted to imgur and returned a callback as a URL, which appeared fine when pasted into the browser bar, but any attempts to make the image appear in an image tag gave me a 403 forbidden error. Despite how close I was to implementing the Imgur upload, I decided it was better to forgo it and take a different approach to storing the images. It cost me a few hours of my time, but it was a valuable lesson to learn (Besides I did learn how to send http headers in javascript, so it wasn’t a total loss regardless).