MyMealPlan App

Code Challenge by Andy Wong

Answers to Challenge Questions:

React w/ Styled Components and Django w/ Django Rest Framework are the tools I'm most familiar with.
I did not go with TypeScript for the sake of time. It's great in a production app but can hinder rapid prototyping.
Both React and Django allow me to set up projects quickly and create a structure that has enough room for complexity.
Django allows me to do more complex data filtering and querying with its ORM and the Admin interface allows me to easily create initial recipes without having to type them in painfully by hand.
Serialization, Viewsets, and pagination are made a lot easier by DRF. If I used Flask I'd have to make everything from near scratch and they wouldn't work as well together.

With Django/DRF there can be possible slowness, due to Python's speed as a language or framework bloat.
This can be mitigated somewhat with refactoring/paring down and if you use Gunicorn to create several service workers to handle many requests.
Aside from Django, most API bottlenecks can be due to the database and if there is a lack of indexing.
I've used Sqlite3 as the database for easy demoing, but for a live environment I'd use Postgres or MySQL.
Right now the database is as fast as your file system since it's a local file.
React doesn't have as many limitations, but building from CRA does box you in a bit. That can be solved by ejecting if you want a fully customizable frontend application.

How would you change the user stories or proposed functionality to better align with the product goal?

Allow the user to define budget percentages. I used 10% of their weekly paycheck to determine what recipes would show, but it would be better if the user could adjust that percent with a slider or input.
Allow monthly planning for better planning in advance, this also might be better or more lucrative for an Instacart-like service.
Allow the user to define family members. Right now this app is geared towards an individual due to the current spec and does not account for family members.
If recipe directions were added, I would certainly add measurement conversion methods to help the user choose whether they wanted to use standard or metric amounts. For the sake of time, I did not include them.

My main focus overall was to build a basic functioning MVP in a short time frame, I had about a day of time slotted to work on this.
I would liked to add more tests in the frontend, but that would take up more time. The majority of tests are in the backend since that's where a lot of the logic is.
I created a pretty basic solution for suggesting recipes, I decided not to focus too much on this because this could be refined over time in an actual project. It's easy to get absorbed in that process and waste time when your goal is making a presentable proof-of-concept.

Make sure you have docker installed: https://hub.docker.com/editions/community/docker-ce-desktop-mac
In the root folder of the project, run: docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up
if you are running this for the first time, it will take several minutes for the docker images to be built and run.
Once you see that both frontend and backend are running, you can access them:
- Open http://localhost:3000 to view the frontend in the browser.
- Open http://localhost:8000/v1/ to view the backend API in the browser.
Both images are running in development mode for demonstration purposes.
Both the frontend and backend need to be running to be functioning properly.
CTRL-C to stop docker-compose, make sure to shut down the images with docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml down.

The frontend uses NodeJS v10.16.1
Make sure you have NodeJS installed, we suggest using NVM
Clone this repo via git: git clone https://github.com/alacritythief/MyMealPlan.git
Enter the repo's client folder cd MyMealPlan/client and npm install to install dependencies
npm start to run the app in dev mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

http://localhost:8000/v1/recipes/?budget=360&allergies=peanut
The above lists recipes that apply to the person's weekly paycheck amount of $360 and excluding recipes that have peanuts.
http://localhost:8000/v1/recipes/?allergies=peanut,dairy
The above filters out recipes that contain dairy and peanuts.

Make sure python, pip, setuptools, virtualenv, and virtualenvwrapper are up-to-date:

Installing Python 3.7:

Updating pip and setuptools:

Installing Virtualenv and Virtualenvwrapper:

Make sure Python, pip, setuptools, Virtualenv, and Virtualenvwrapper, are installed and up-to-date. Please see the Before Setup section above.
mkvirtualenv MyMealPlan to create your initial Python environment.
In the future, you can set your virtualenv by using workon MyMealPlan now that it has been created.
Clone this repo into the directory of your choice git clone https://github.com/alacritythief/MyMealPlan.git.
Enter the main directory of the API with cd MyMealPlan/api and run: pip3 install -r requirements.txt
Launch the backend server with ./manage.py runserver.
You can launch into debug mode with DEBUG=True ./manage.py runserver
You can access the root API at http://localhost:8000/v1/
You can access the Django-Admin at http://localhost:8000/admin/