First of all, hi and nice to meet you! 👾 Welcome to my dev log.
My name is Pauline and I’m currently a masters student at HTW Berlin for International Media and Computing. I have been focusing mostly on game development with Unity during my Bachelor studies, but grew to love backend web development thanks to my job as a working student. Currently, I work at Sandbox Interactive as a web developer, mostly picking up backend tasks.
When I'm not coding, you can usually catch me drinking a cup of green tea, gaming, or complaining about something (mostly uni stuff though 👀). I would also consider myself someone who takes cooking, recipe searches, and recipe organization very seriously. The amount of recipe books and magazines I have accumulated at home is slowly scaring me, and it hurts the part of me that wants to digitize literally everything and enjoys gathering and evaluating a lot of data*.*
I've recently worked on two web projects for some uni courses, which made me realize that I've gotten into a good flow with Spring Boot/Java, but not at all with any frontend frameworks. I've had some brief contact with Vue.js and React/React Native at work or for those uni projects, but still feel like I have no clue about frontend development at all (might be because I’m not a big fan of JavaScript.. but maybe TypeScript can help?).
This made me think that I'd have great grounds for a dev log about the cookbook app I had planned for a while now - showing my process and sharing some knowledge about Spring Boot, whilst taking you on a learning journey about frontend development with me.
I have never found a cookbook app that I like. They never have all the features I want, and even when I am willing to do without one of those features, a lot of stuff is hidden behind paywalls. To change this I have already spent a lot of time collecting feature ideas and planning a roadmap to develop the ✨perfect✨ cookbook and meal-planning app. This is a dream project of mine, but I am aware that I might not make much progress as a team of one.
So instead of targeting a full-fletched project what I want to do for now is to lay the foundation for this app. I’ve planned out the tasks for a very rough MVP and have enrolled the development of said MVP into one of my uni courses. If you want to know more about the exact process I want to follow for the next 3-4 months, take a look at the proposal I wrote for the enrollment.
In order to complete the uni course, I’ve tasked myself with the development of a mobile recipe database application, and an accompanying service for transforming recipe texts into a uniform recipe format. This service will later be used to create new recipes by reading them from websites or images provided by the user.
I have already decided on some of the technologies I want to use: Spring Boot in the Backend, React Native in the Frontend. I was told that React is generally a good framework to use as a backend enthusiast, so I hope this proves to be true.
So now - let’s conclude the introductions and get started with development!
Tasks I worked on during this session:
During all of this I tinkered around with my JetBrains products a lot; I added YouTrack integrations to IntelliJ and updated all products and plugins. I also made sure my IONOS server was ready for future deployments. Thanks to student licensing I get to use all of these products (almost) for free, including JetBrains products, GitHub Pro, an IONOS Cloud Server and Notion (which I used to write this very Dev Log).