This is a culinary journal that serves to record any memorable dishes I have eaten or cooked. The journal currently only lists a few of the entries I have imported from my personal culinary Instagram but will eventually consist of entries added on a near-daily basis.
The project is a functional CRUD app consisting of a React frontend and Next.js backend. Next.js was selected due to its intuitive features, such as nested page routing, built-in API routes, and native SSG and SSR capabilities, lending a great deal of flexibility with regard to app infrastructure. Database modification is protected by NextAuth by which users can gain editing credentials via e-mail.
The app design is constructed primarily from Material UI, a React component library based off of Google’s Material Design system. The library provides pre-stylized components with integrated functionality while maintaining design flexibility with the inline ‘sx’ CSS prop. The library was selected due to its popularity within modern-day web design, extensive documentation, and degree of customization across the board.
Information storage and persistence is accomplished through a PostgreSQL database hosted on Railway.app with images stored in a AWS S3 bucket. The server interacts with the database through Prisma, an ORM that interfaces serverside JavaScript to SQL. This integrates well with the built-in Next.js API endpoints, resulting in a very lightweight backend solution.
The app was intially developed using services provided by Google’s Firebase (Hosting, Authentication, and Realtime Database) due to its advertised ease-of-use as a Backend-as-a-Service. However, I found that Firebase operated in a relatively proprietary manner and eventually transitioned off of it in favor of more conventional and instructional technologies such as PostgreSQL and Prisma.