Introducing Menu-Helper - 2024-11-11

For a long time now I've been trying to develop a program that would help to choose meals for the week, and I've finally made it.

The problem I tend to have in choosing meals for the week is that there are so many to choose from that I end up simply choosing the same things over and over again. This is fine when you're the only person eating (and you're a man), but when you're making meals for others it can get tiresome. So I wanted some system/database that I could consult that would easily give me recipes I could cook, but filtering them by what I need or want. It's because of this that I started working on Menu-Helper.

The idea was that Menu-Helper would hold a database of recipe names and a short description (since I don't need instructions for recipes I already know), along with associated ingredients and tags that I could use to filter recipes. Thus, let's say I had a lot of potatoes that I want to use, I could filter my recipes to only include those which contain potatoes in them; or if I want a dinner recipe I could filter for the tag "dinner." This would bring down the number of recipes I have to consider which makes decision-making much easier.

Now, although I've had this idea for years it took me a very long time to write this mostly because I thought of taking advantage of the opportunity to write it in a new language like Python or Rust, but in the end I got bogged down in trying to use the language itself that I got discouraged and eventually abandoned the project. So this last time around I decided to simply write the program in C++, which I'm already used to. The project went much quicker and I finally was able to release v1.0.

Like my other projects, the code for Menu-Helper can be found in my personal git repository^[1] as well as on GitHub.^[2] If you would like to contribute to the project, please read the contribution information.^[3]

References

Last updated: 2024-11-11