Rosie's Kitchen
Rosie's Kitchen is a personal project that turned into an all out playground. I already have a passion for food (both cooking and eating) and with RK, I've been able to explore the intersection of food with my other passion: technology.
But why work on recipe management? It turns out, there are a seemingly endless amount of issues in this space. Categorization and taxonomy, natural language processing, cultural translation of units, caloric estimation, taste profiles, diets, allergies, substitutions, lineage, recipe creation, portability, purchasing, what to do with stacks of old cook books... The deeper I got, the deeper I wanted to go.
Additionally, many classic cookbooks are phenomenal examples of content structure, photography, and typography. One of my design goals in RK was to replicate a sheet of paper, removing as many boundaries as possible. At a glance, a recipe on a large screen should be reminiscent of an open book. On a small screen, it should be simple and approachable, which is the opposite of most advertisement laden recipe sites.
On the dev side of things, RK was built using Angular JS with a Django backend on Heroku, and using an Amazon RDS sequel database. Natural language processing was done using NLTK and the sckit-learn wrapper. Initially it was built as a fully fledged responsive desktop site, but later in its life, I was focusing on creating a first class hybrid app for iOS.
"[you] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, you didn’t stop to think if you should." RK is a project without an end goal, but not one without purpose. I've relaunched several times over the last couple of years with various amounts of traction, but its real fruit-fullness has come in the form of self teaching and exploration.
Some things I've learned and explored because of RK:
- Natural language processing
- Ingredient mapping to USDA certified database
- Caloric estimation based on food weights
- Text to speech voice over of recipes for hands free cooking
- Sub 1s initial paint for client app
- OCR and image manipulation using canvas and the Google Cloud image API
- Solr search implementation
- Building a hybrid app for iOS with Swift 3
- Optimized static asset handling and distribution using AWS Cloudfront
- SEO techniques and hacks for SPAs
I'm considering revisiting RK using Firebase as a backend and focusing solely on the creation and representation of recipes, using microdata as my storage format of choice. Until then, I'll keep pursuing my passion for food and tech, waiting for the day when they intersect again.