Microwavin Manoa

What is Microwavin Manoa?

As many college students have limited kitchen resources, limited cooking skills, limited time, limited access to grocery stores, and no access to creative recipes that respect these constraints, they may choose to spend money to eat out or choose unhealthy options such as fast food places or vending machines.

Our final project in ICS 314 was to develop a solution to this problem. Microwavin Manoa aims to solve this problem by creating a way for students (on-campus or off) to learn and share recipes that could be made with minimal kitchen facilities out of ingredients that are available within walking distance of UH. The recipes could be filtered in various ways, such as to dietary restrictions or preferences such as recipes that could be made in 10 minutes. Each recipe had an estimated cost, number of servings, and time to make it.

Links

The app was deployed here with Digital Ocean. The GitHub page which contains more info on the app is linked here. The source code is located here.

Teaming Up and Dreaming Up

This was a group project where I collaborated with three others, using Meteor, React, Uniforms, and Semantic UI React. My team met up twice a week in-person to collaborate on the project, as well as a work on a call remotely during the weekend. Meeting up so consistently ensured that we all knew where each other was in terms of the project and allowed for us to bring up any questions or concerns that we could address as a group. After we went over new issues that needed to be focused on next, we would each work on our own tasks. This meant that if any of us ran into a problem while coding, the one of the other three could quickly and easily help out. When debugging, this was especially useful.

Backend to Frontend

For this project, I mainly worked on backend development. I mainly developed the various subscriptions and publications of the collections that held the data. For example, I worked on the tagging and filtering system that was on the Search Recipes page. I also maintained the TestCafe tests, as they often failed when people updated the source code. At the start, it was a struggle to understand how the TestCafe worked, but once I did, it was simple and overall useful to ensure that our app was working as intended.

As for frontend development, I gave my thoughts when my other teammates asked for my opinion. This also goes for the font and color choices for the app, as I don’t really have an eye for colors and prefer to stick with pre-generated palettes that you can find online. My teammates did an amazing job, and I was so surprised by how clean and nice they made the application look.

Experiences

Overall, creating this application gave me a lot of experience with working on and coding a larger project with a team. I learned how to use a variety of new tools that definitely made the process a lot more streamlined. While working in a group, I realized that not all of our goals were going to be met. While we definitely did accomplish a lot, I had to learn to set realistic expectations for myself. Often, we’d think a task was easily manageable and able to be finished in a couple of days, only to learn that there is much more to it. This experience definitely taught me a lot, and I’m incredibly proud of what my group created together.