At its core that mostly what it is. The project forced me to get out of my comfort zone as a programmer. I picked up 2 new language/frameoworks (rails and angular), had to learn about building infrastructure on top of aws, deep dived into elasticsearch and then pollish everything enough to get it to a "showoff-able"(word?) state.
I think the reactions you're getting are likely focusing on this project as a useful product or a business, not a coding exercise.
Because it's well-trod territory, with existing products that have been around for years, you're probably seeing more negativity than you would have if we all knew this was a learning project.
That said, not every step of every coder's learning process is broadly interesting to a community of people who have been programming for decades in some cases.
Usually these kinds of posts are better received when they come as a blog post about what the person's background is, what they were trying to learn, and how they felt about using those tools for the first time.
Hey cryptica. The intention of this post was not to "raise money from investors" (the service is free and I have no plans to monetize it so it would be a terrible investment). The intention was to show off something I've been working on in my free time. The project did indeed start because I had issues filtering through all the saved recipes in my browser's bookmarks.
Has it been going a while, possibly under another name?
I tried to log in and was told my email address had already used the service, and sure enough, a password reset had me logged in. I have no recollection of using it, so it may have been some time ago.
I like it. It doesn't quite scratch my itch, but it looks a useful tool.
I've never used CopyMeThat but I just looked through it quickly. It looks like a good app for solving a similar problem that feastgenius is solving. I think the difference with what I built is that it also calculates the nutrition content per serving. This was important for me personally because I use the app to search for recipes in certain macros ranges. For example, Finding chicken recipes in a macro range of (carbs:30-50, protein:20-40, fat:10-20). The search for feastgenius was built on top of elasticseach and in the near future I'll be building out more features based around really robust searching. I'll also be focusing time on building features for discovering new recipes.
I hope that answers the question :)
For this project, I used Spoonaculars API for clipping recipes. I would be very interested in creating my own, similar to what you did. That would give me more control over the process. Did you come across any open source repos when you worked on your crawler?
> Is there a reason you don't include the instructions of the recipe on your website?
Yes, when users clip recipes from another source I want to make sure that users need to navigate back to the original page to see the instructions. This is to ensure the original author gets credit for it. If a user adds a recipe themselves to the site then it will show the instructions. Here is an example of a recipe with instructions for demo purposes, https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/everything-nice-jerk-chi....
I have not used paprika myself so unfortunately I cannot comment. But if there are any features that you would like me to focus on for the next updates of feastgenius let me know and I will work them in.
I think the biggest feature for most people is that they don't want it to dissapear after 10 years. Many people put a lot of work into their recipe collection and wants it to be available for the kids when they grow up.
This sounds like something I would use if it were public. It would be awesome If I could swap recipes from the plan. For example, if I didn't feel like having stir fry I could swap it out for a meal with similar points.
I've thought about making it public, but it's highly optimized for me... also therea no gui. It's just a command line app in python. I could make it open source though. It would be neat to see how other people modify it.
Maybe find some people from this list that you can try to present with a private alpha version - no polish no bells and whistles - less than an mvp. See what happens from there.
kudos! i got similar problems with optimizing recipes & groceries, but i never got past google keep and apple reminder.
anyway, a word of caution about open sourcing. people are quick to scream that you make the source available. but what about this? an article/blog describing in more details how you solved the problem instead? few people ever ask that.
what i saw with open source is, once you put the code out there, people will start requesting features, making you carry the burden of maintenance, etc. but ofc there are good things too. i just haven't seen it with small niche projects.
I'm also working on something like that for myself (because of a colicky baby and hearing that low FODMAP diets help). Right now I have basic schema.org recipe ingestion working.
I'd be interested in chatting about it, but you dont have any contact info listed in your profile.
