VeGood
A full stack recipe sharing and meal planning app all rolled into one. My current passion project.
Overview
VeGood is a full-stack recipe sharing and meal planning application, my current passion project. It combines recipe discovery, social sharing, and weekly meal planning into a single cohesive experience, designed and built entirely by me.
The Challenge
Most recipe apps do one thing well, either browsing or planning, but rarely both. I wanted to build something that felt genuinely useful for everyday meal prep without the friction of switching between multiple tools. My partner and I often struggle to ba;ance a busy work life with planning a new set of meals each week that feel exciting, healthy and fresh.
Design Process
I started in Figma, building out a full design system and high-fidelity mocks before writing a line of code. The design system includes a custom colour palette, typography scale, component library, and dark mode tokens, all defined as Figma variables for easy handoff to code. Having this solid fundation mapped out meant that designs could then be worked on and iterated with a set of boundaries in place, I worked heavily with Claude to generate creative solutions and rapidly iterate through different UI examples. Doing this effectively baked the prototyping stage right into the design process.
Once I was happy with a design and how it functioned, I'd then focus on refining from there, ensuring performance and code maintainability were top notch.
Technical Stack
- Next.js App Router — Full-stack framework handling both the UI and API routes, I wanted to push myself to try a new framework that would allow me to challenge myself and see if I could build a full stack application.
- Neon Postgres — Serverless Postgres database with branching for safe schema migrations, I also wamted to lean on my knowledge of postgreSQL and build something that would allow me to utilise it to the fullest. I work with GraphQL daily and wanted to explore all the benefits that PostgreSQL has to offer.
- Drizzle ORM — Type-safe database queries with a schema-first approach, a new tool I wanted to try that makes working with databases much easier, especially with writing the complex queries I'd need for this application.
- Tailwind CSS v4 — Utility-first styling, configured entirely via CSS
@themetokens matching the Figma design system, I'd always been a Tailwind sceptic, but this project allowed me to fully appreciate just how quickly you can move when it comes to building interfaces.
Key Features
- Recipe creation, editing, and browsing with rich ingredient and method data
- Weekly meal planner with scheduling
- Automatic shopping list generation from planned meals
- User profiles and recipe collections
- Still very much a work in progress, new features will be added over time.
What I Learned
Building VeGood end-to-end, from initial concept through Figma design to full-stack implementation, will give me a much deeper appreciation for the full product development cycle. The biggest challenge will be figuring out how to implement the sophisticated infrastructure to allow an application like this to scale, something I'm very much looking forward to challenging myself with.