This is the most recent incarnation of my recipe app. I think this is my fourth iteration (GitHub suggests there have been 5 beforehand but I worked on three of them in tandem).

Goals

Realistic goals

In all likelihood, this app won’t result in much. If I follow my previous patterns, I’ll get bored, move on, then start another recipe-related project at a later date. Given that, I have a few goals for this project.

Firstly, I’d like to explore Domain Driven Design in Rails. While I have done this to some extent before, I’d like to:

• Use event sourcing enough to get a good feel for its pros and cons
• Work out how useful the repository pattern can be in avoiding ActiveRecord’s pitfalls
• Try to get back to some classic Object-Oriented Design habits. I tend to prefer functional programming, but I don;t want to forget the positives of OOD. I also feel like Rails typically promotes a fairly weak form of OOD where a lot of logic gets pushed into essentially procedural “service objects”.
• See what happens when I fundamentally change a data model. Rather than thinking about recipes, I’m modelling them as a collection of steps. By changing my thinking, I hope to be able to unlock a lot of features that would otherwise be a lot harder to design.

Less realistic goals

I cook quite a bit. I very often cook from my phone, looking up recipes online and following them. Unfortunately, I hate recipe websites.

Recipe websites are optimized to make money. They have a load of irrelevant content for SEO purposes. That’s great for helping me find a recipe, but just gets in the way when I want to start cooking. The adds are even worse, popping up and covering the content I actually want to read. When I do actually get to the content, it’s formatted in a way that makes it easy to skim-read the recipe, not in a way that’s actually easy to follow on a phone (I have to scroll back up to the ingredients section all the time).

Recipe websites also don’t work well with the way I cook. I’m often cooking multiple recipes, and may have leftovers I’m trying to incorporate. I’m not good at time estimation a pretty classic software engineer trait, so the rough estimates on recipe websites aren’t very useful.

Finally, recipe websites don’t take advantage of the machines displaying them. Most sites are little better than a page in a book. If you’re lucky they might scale the ingredients or change the units, but not much more. I think there are loads of ways computers could simplify the cooking process if recipes were just slightly more structured.