UF WiNGHacks Hackathon 2025 -- First Flight Award Winner 🥇
Chomplate was born out of a shared experience of having a love for cooking and never having enough time to find high-quality, healthy recipe ideas. Especially as a STEM major always focused on classes, it can be hard to set aside time to make nourishing meals – let alone spend hours searching for recipes.
We decided to create a program where people could share their go-to recipes and find new favorites to get them through each busy week.
We decided to create an app using a JavaScript framework, React Native/Expo, to meet this project’s goals. Neither of us had coded in React Native before, but we were eager to learn about it and immediately rose to the challenge! We began by implementing React Navigation to create a foundation to build off of, then split the work between front-end and back-end. Jess primarily worked on the front-end, creating the different user interfaces, such as the recipe cards, recipe pages, and the new recipe form. Giovana focused on implementing the back-end logic and set up data management with Appwrite, including fetching and storing the user’s inputs in the cloud to allow users to view each other’s recipes.
During development, we ran into many challenges. We knew that learning a new language in 36 hours would be a major challenge, and were proven right as we worked on Chomplate. It took us multiple hours to get the project initially set up, as we were unsure which plugins and frameworks would be best suited for our project. After we got past that, understanding the syntax was a major learning curve, especially when it came to debugging error messages and working with functions and components.
Being the first time we have ever worked in React Native, we are very proud that all of the functions we implemented work as intended. On top of that, the fact that we were able to overcome all of the obstacles that we faced during the development of the app really made us stronger programmers! We created our very first app from scratch, complete with user input, a cloud database, and a visually appealing user design. We accomplished exactly what we set out to do at the beginning of the hackathon, and learned valuable lessons throughout the process.
During these 36 hours, we were able to learn so much about the fundamentals of React Native, Expo GO, and working with databases. We also learned how to work on a program in a time crunch with a teammate, which is essential for time management, task delegation, and prioritization skills.
Moving forward, we would love to fine tune a few aspects of Chomplate, create a user account creation system, and optimize it to be launched as a public online app. Additionally, we think it would be beneficial to add a search and filtering feature, where users could find specific recipes based on what they’re looking for.