Launching my first Node.js site on Product Hunt [mixRecipes]
I’ve been primarily an iOS developer for the last few years, so naturally, when I started dabbling with web development, Vapor was the obvious choice.
I had moderate success with Vapor and was able to quickly build out two sites with pretty minimal effort https://pointillism.digitalbunker.dev/ and https://gitrandom.digitalbunker.dev/
Eventually, the lack of documentation and open source libraries compared to Node.js ecosystem inspired a switch.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been building out a few sites and the first production-ready project launched on Product Hunt last night — mixRecipes.
In quarantine, I’ve been indulging in my cooking hobby more and more. I was quickly running out of dinner ideas and was struggling to find something novel to cook that would also challenge my culinary abilities.
So, after a weekend of writing some data scraping scripts, I built mixRecipes. The service now includes over 1000 recipes from 195 countries and cuisines.
Now, everyone can receive interesting and novel recipe ideas everyday. We’ll send you recipes ranging from Swiss Alplermagronen to Macedonian ajvar. Don’t know what those are? Then, this free service is perfect for you! All of your recipes come with a full allergy, nutrients, vitamins, and dietary information breakdown.
The hardest part of the project was actually building out the HTML email template that would contain the recipe. Coming from a mobile development world, I didn’t fully understand the restrictions placed on HTML emails across different email providers. Creating an appealing HTML email template that behaved properly across providers took far longer than any other portion of the project.
Finally, with the HTML email template complete and the MailGun API integration, I was all set to launch on ProductHunt.
I woke up cautiously optimistic this morning being and was greeted with absolutely zero traction on ProductHunt 😂.
Can’t say it’s the first time that’s happened.
Not a problem though, this was primarily an exercise in increasing my engineering skillset. It also helps me achieve my goal of 1,000,000 impressions across all of my engineering contributions (articles, videos, app downloads, etc) that I set for myself this year.
Just wanted to share this new project with my audience here in case anyone was interested. If you’d like to support the project, please check out my post on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mixrecipes-by-digitalbunker) or sign up directly at http://mixrecipes.digitalbunker.dev/
There are plenty of additional projects in the pipeline!
My Recent Projects
Personal Website: https://digitalbunker.dev/
http://stickerspot.digitalbunker.dev/
