A New Hope

Yes, of course that's a crappy Rogue One joke, because a new Star Wars movie came out.  More to the point, though, it's sorta true.  I've been working in earnest on my own recipe website for the last few months.  Originally, it was Python on Google App Engine (no wait, it was Angular!), then Python, then Python on a VPS solution.  I've learned a lot - especially around standing up infrastructure and basic security principles.  Enough so, that I've spent more time on the operations and infrastructure than I have on the actual feature code itself.  However, to move forward a little faster, I decided to see if there was another open source solution available.  Lo and behold, there was.  Before I get into that, though, let's go through my overall motivations for this project:

Motivations

• I'm a software engineering manager now, not a software engineer.  In order to keep current on some skills, and learn some new ones, I wanted to get involved in a project.
• I wanted to work on a project that has some nominal value for me.  Because I cook a lot, and because recipe sites are rife with ads that make browsing unbearably slow, I decided to write a recipe site.
• Yes, I know I could do a ton of other things like install ad blocking software, utilize Google Drive, or probably just buy software, but I'm cheap and, also, see bullet point one.
• I also want to learn as much as possible to run a small website.  This isn't start up territory where I lose money when I don't ship features.  This is a labor of love and software engineering.  Here's a list of things I want to explore and improve: back end feature development, front end feature development and UX design, mobile development, DB administration, scalability, reliability, monitoring, infrastructure as code, data science and documentation.  So, basically everything I can get my hands on (I'm sure there will be more).  However, I realize I may never get to all of those things, but it should be fun to try.
• I do actually want to use the site though, and, if I concentrate on all of those things, I'll learn a lot (which is ok in the case), but won't actually have a product.

I realized after doing this, though, that one thing I liked about being a software engineer was being a code detective.  It annoys me to no end when people throw out old, working code to start over in search of a 'better' system rather than spend a little effort to improve what's there already.  In order to meet my goals above and adhere to my software engineering principles, I decided to find an open source recipe system I could work from.  In five minutes I found Open Eats by Googling for 'open source recipe software'.  Here's my copy of the repository.  Wish me luck!