Benson Cooks

A simple website meant to give recipes based on what ingredients you want to cook with.

Comment

Our Team

David, Angela, Hubert, Collin

Inspiration

The inspiration for the project was to provide a way for college students to cook meals that are healthier given what they have in their refrigerators. This will help students cut down on food waste and give them an opportunity to explore new recipes.

The project was named after David and Hubert's cat benson who does nothing but eat their food.

What it does

Given a list of ingredients that you want in a dish, as well as a list of ingredients you don't want the site will provide a variety of recipes fulfilling those constraints.

How we built it

We used the spoonacular API to serve as our backend. The front end was put together with vanilla HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into more than a couple. Early on we struggled to find a suitable API for our project. Every API had its tradeoffs but for a "free" and relatively simple API we chose... Edamam. Only to scrap it immediately and switch to the spoonacular API. This wasted a good chunk of time especially as certain teammates were learning how to use REST APIs for the first time.

Towards the latter end of the hackathon the challenge was time. While we wanted to iron out some of the bugs we just couldn't in time for the 6 - 6:30 am deadline. Additionally, 3/4 of the team fell asleep and are still asleep as of writing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Each person worked on their own tasks depending on their experience with front end web development and did amazing!

  • Angela did an outstanding job picking up HTML for the first time and creating the cards for the recipes.
  • Hubert created the tag input boxes with vanilla HTML, CSS, Javascript and also worked on most other major components of the UI
  • Collin created the text autofill which helps users see what they can input
  • David was there to help the team out and worked on the api requests.

What we learned

Much of the team was new so it was mostly a "how to do web development" event. Though we also learned how to work in a team and communicate with each other delegating tasks to make an awesome website!

What's next for Benson Cooks

Definitely some bug fixes and maybe a new API.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates