It is October, that wonderful time of the year where a certain cloud provider dispenses t-shirts in exchange for potentially dubious pull requests. This year I’ve decided to give myself a challenge: to design and build an open source recipe management system before the month is out.

The Why Link to heading

Why do this? My reasoning is three-fold:

First, I haven’t built anything for myself in quite some time. This will be an excellent way to try out some different technologies and enjoy a change of pace from my day job.

Second, tracking the progress of development will be a great motivator to write more blog posts.

Finally, I just want a good recipe manager!

The Rules Link to heading

Time-wise, I’m beginning work as this blog post goes live, and aim to “deliver” a working product by the end of the day on October 31.

I’ll also be playing with Hackathon-style rules as far as prior work goes. No design documents, no code, nothing but ideas floating in my head until the challenge begins.

Each week (most likely on Mondays) I’ll post a development update on my blog, followed by a postmortem on the whole experience in early November.

The Goals Link to heading

Now on to the fun stuff, exactly what I intend to make. Many recipe managers currently available are basically just glorified notepads. You might get some fancy formatting, but at the end of the day you’ve still just got the same information you’d have on a physical recipe card. A name, a list of ingredients, and a list of instructions; just a bunch of text strings.

I’d like to create a system that encodes more useful information and allows a frontend to infer a lot more; things like sensible serving adjustments, equipment needed, what steps require active attention and what ones leave the cook free to do other tasks.

Naturally I’d like to build something that I can continue to improve over time, but for the purposes of this challenge I also need a clearly defined end state. This may get tweaked as the month goes on, but at time of writing I hope to finish the month with the following:

• A reusable core library implementing the basic data structures, operations, and a backend storage model.
• A handful of command-line utilities for basic display, conversion, and basic editing of recipes.
• A simple GUI application for everyday browsing and display, with a full-featured editor built in.

I think I’ve set some perfectly reasonable goals for myself here, but whatever the case I’ll be back next week with the first development update!