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Why do meal and recipe planners pop up here so frequently?



I think its finally time to convert your 'family recipes' book to your own database to share with the family.

And there aren't many good free solutions out there that are user-friendly and accessible everywhere easily. Desktop apps don't cut it anymore especially now that you want to share something in your family's chat group.

People have also started gathering/modifying their own recipes from sites all over, so importing recipes is becoming crucial, especially with certain diets and a personal <insert diet> plan.


It's a spicier version of ToDo app that you build to test out new stack. Sick of doing another todo app for learning experience, but this time with Rails+Vue instead of Symfony+React? Let's make a recipe site instead, this one has pictures!

I know, I've built one myself when learning new stack. Way more fun than todo app.


A theory: recipes are algorithms (and datastructures), and every human programmer -- and all their friends and family -- have to eat. So there's a reasonable likelihood that programmers will (consciously or unconsciously) pattern match that and develop systems to assist.

If I remember correctly, Doug Engelbart's Demo[1] included a feature to organize a shopping list.

And the history of Elasticsearch[2] also began with recipes.

[1] - https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/448/

[2] - https://www.elastic.co/about/history-of-elasticsearch


I think it's in the "hacker's" interest to optimize and improve the tedious chores like meal planning and grocery shopping.


> grocery shopping.

Is there a highly configurable app for sorting groceries? I’m currently using the pro version of copymethat [0], and it does a decent job of figuring out what aisles certain products belong to, and then let me sort those aisles however I want.

But what I can’t do, is telling it that I don’t have "eggs & dairy" but instead those are two sections in different places (and still properly sorting). I also can’t save separate orders for the aisles, one REWE has aisles sorted X Y Z, the other might be X Z Y. And I also want it to know about some local brands. "Deit" (German no sugar soda) gets currently sorted into "Other" by default, while I want it to be in "Beverages"

I even tried to make something like that myself, but besides my lack of knowledge of ML, I also had issues getting the proper data in a clean format, I ended up having to create a 100 item dataset which then (either in general or because I didn’t know what I was doing) was not enough to get good results.

[0]: https://copymethat.com/


It's one of the programmer's rite of passage projects - along with todo apps, custom programming languages and text editors.




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