engineering

When it’s going well, software development can be as enjoyable and straightforward as building a model from LEGO bricks: you have an idea or a goal in mind, and you begin to scour through the available components to put together the intended result. If you’re lucky, you find detailed instructions – requirements and documentation – to help you along your way. Meanwhile, one of the reasons that open source software has become so successful over the past few decades is that different software developers are frequently looking for components that match similar requirements when they’re building systems. …

This is the second post in a series that explores the technology that RecipeRadar uses to process and store recipe ingredients In part one, we introduced a simplified version of the data model and XML format that RecipeRadar uses to represent ingredient information. In this post, we’ll explain how we handle singular and plural ingredient names for English-language ingredient text. Let’s begin by presenting two of RecipeRadar’s ingredient search use cases. …

This is the first post in a series that explores the technology that RecipeRadar uses to process and store recipe ingredients As a recipe search engine, RecipeRadar aims to collect and understand recipe content from around the web. We’re able to crawl recipes from any website supported by the recipe-scrapers Python library, and the results of each crawl include – among other details – a list of the recipe’s ingredients and a list of the preparation step involved. …

The engineering tag will be the home for a series of articles detailing the engineering effort behind building RecipeRadar, a recipe search engine and meal planner. From Kubernetes to proxy caching, from Python to ingredient graphs, we’ll write content to explain the technology behind the application, and how those technologies were selected and evaluated. …