Murilo Boareto Delefrate's Blog

Week Meal Plan #1 - creating and developing a new product

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Murilo Boareto Delefrate
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4 min read

Once you get yourself thinking "I need this", there are 3 options: search for a solution, create the solution or forget about it. As a developer, I always tend to think more "how could I do to solve this problem?". And, for now, this is not different. Follow me through this path where I'll create a product, from scratch, showing all my thoughts, whys and implementations!

Me and my wife are cooking lovers, but we always struggle on the "what are we going to eat tomorrow?". Thinking about meals for the weekend it's easy because you have more time to cook! You can, actually, dedicate Saturdays and Sundays entirely focused on cooking. But, what about weekends?! How can I have a tasty lunch on Tuesdays without spending the whole morning preparing it?

I found some really interesting books on amazon related to that topic, such as:

  • Cook once, eat all week
  • En 2h je cuisine pour toute la semaine (In 2h I cook for the whole week)
  • En 1 heure, je cuisine les repas de mes enfants pour toute la semaine (In 1 hour, I cook the meals for my kids for the whole week)

What are the problem for those books? limited meals! I'm not saying that I want infinite ideas of meals, but if I can get a really huge variety of ideas, I would appreciate it.

And where could I find ideas of meals? Here are some websites:

And what could we do with all those websites? Well... get the recipes from them and propose a week meal plan! Sounds fun, right?!

Good! We have a real problem (at least to me, hehe) and a possible solution. By answering those 2 questions below it will become easier to see that:

Who is the Customer? Me! And people who prefer to cook his own meals but suffer from ideas and wants/would like to have a meal plan for the entire week.

What job does the Customer need to have done? A different week meal plan for the whole year with the list of all ingredients and step-by-step on how to prepare each meal.

Great! Repository on github already created (github.com/murilobd/week-meal-planner). Next post I'll start implementing the idea!

Maybe you're thinking: "what about the technologies/frameworks you'll use?" and my answer to this is: I don't know. I might use Laravel, because I'm comfortable with it, but I could also use Next.js to see how its API works and to strengthen my React skills, or even try (Fastify)[fastify.io/] to strengthen my nodejs skills. So, I don't know! I'm not worried about that right now. To the Customer, this doesn't matter, so I won't focus on that for now ;)

Let me know on comments what do you think about this approach to create a product!

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