status-update

The team learned of some existing issues in the black Python code formatter that we use to format some of our published code, and is providing time to help. The team has also been working on maintenance and bugfixes since the last fortnightly update: Preparations have been put in place to update RecipeRadar when the release of SQLAlchemy v1.4 lands, which is anticipated within the next few weeks A serious user-facing bug that prevent recipe scaling was identified and fixed - we believe that this affected users who retrieved the application between 2021-01-06 and 2021-02-08 …

This week’s update includes a video feature-preview of the (oft-touted, rarely progressed) multi-device collaboration feature. The user interface is intended to be as straightforward as possible. You’ll pick a username and a ‘room name’ - a shared name for the place you’d like your meal plan and shopping list to be available - and by providing that room name to your friends or other devices, they’ll be able to participate equally in the session. …

Nutritional Information The main item of news today is that we’ve launched display of nutritional information in the application. Not all – and in fact, not many – recipes that we’ve collected so far have nutritional information included alongside them, but when present that information will now be displayed in the search results. We’re currently refreshing (or ‘reindexing’ as we call it within the team) the recipe data on RecipeRadar, and more nutritional information will appear as this process continues. …

During the last two weeks, we had a relatively radical idea for a way to explore recipes on RecipeRadar. Rather than prompting people to enter the ingredients they have (requiring a modest but noticeable amount of data entry), we can present a list of common recipe ingredients to the user, and allow them to use swipe gestures to say yes/no to the ingredients that they have, saving on typing. As they swipe to indicate whether each ingredient is available, the list of subsequent ingredient choices updates dynamically based on the recipes that match the ingredient selections made so far. …

Welcome to another almost-fortnightly RecipeRadar update. There have been a few developments since the last update: Our first feature-related blog post, “An introduction to ingredient parsing” went live in early November - part of a series with follow-up posts coming soon We’ve completed a large-scale refactoring (re-organization of code and data) to make it easier to manage and correct the information that we store about ingredients. As a side-effect, this has further improved our recipe indexing performance. …

At RecipeRadar engineering HQ, feature development has been continuing - at a slightly unpredictable pace - in a few parallel areas. Collaboration (unblocked) As mentioned during the previous update, we had been blocked on multi-device collaboration work due to an issue affecting database unit tests. The good news is that the issue has since been fixed! Work on multi-device sessions should recommence shortly. Surfacing nutritional information (blocked) Display of nutritional information within the application is in progress, but we’ve hit some snags estimating aggregate nutritional information for recipes. …

Well, it’s been a little over a fortnight since the last update; despite that, progress continues on RecipeRadar. Multi-device Collaboration After some deep thought regarding a technical design for multi-user collaboration on RecipeRadar, we now have a specification written up. The engineering team is working towards implementing this. Most good software includes tests to ensure that the code does what it intends to and that it doesn’t break during future changes. …

This fortnight’s update is relatively short; the engineering team is getting back up to speed following some holiday/vacation time. Nutritional Information Development towards including ingredient nutritional metadata is making good progress - the team’s been in contact with the author of the open source ingreedy-js project that has already constructed an excellent dataset of nutritional metadata. That dataset has now been fuzzy-matched and included into the RecipeRadar ingredients knowledge base. …

While there’s no single large feature that has landed in RecipeRadar in the past fortnight, there are a number of irons in the fire. This week’s update is primarily textual rather than visual – we don’t have any screenshots to share this time – but as you’ll see, that’s appropriate given some of the work we’ve been doing. The items we’re making progress on currently include: Nutritional Information We’ve identified a number of trustworthy and authoritative sources of ingredient nutritional information, including the USDA’s FoodData Central and UK’s CoFID dataset. …

The last couple of weeks have been slow and steady in terms of RecipeRadar software engineering progress. The main focus recently has been on providing recipe data debug tooling in order to help identify and fix future data quality issues. Here’s an overview of how that works. Recipe Data Diagnostics When users are searching for recipes, it’s important that we display accurate representations of the ingredients and directions for each recipe. …