Xamarin

This is the fifth and final post in the series. If you haven’t read the previous posts, I recommend doing so for added context: The why and high level how The tech stack The unplanned API The DevOps I omitted a lot of information about Sharp Cooking’s testing in the previous posts in this series. I wanted to write a dedicated post about the experience, and this is it. Unit testing vs. end-to-end testing I am somewhat biased when it comes to unit testing Single Page Applications (SPAs). I have had very little success in the projects I worked on before. As the codebase grows, the tests have become brittle, and the value has diminished. To be fair, I did put a token effort into unit testing Sharp Cooking, but I ended up discarding the few tests I had. ...

This is the fourth post on the series, if you haven’t seen the other posts yet, I recommend you read them for added context. The why and high level how The tech stack The unplanned API In this post, we will review the decisions and methods related to DevOps of Sharp Cooking. To summarize to the extreme, DevOps is all about people, processes, and tools. However, this post will focus mostly on processes and tools. ...

This is the third post in the series. If you haven’t seen the first two posts yet, I recommend you read them for added context. The why and high level how The tech stack The problem Sharp Cooking allows for recipe extraction from many websites. The original app makes a web request that loads the HTML page and parses the content to identify a recipe. The parsing is done using XPath and a configuration file determining the XPATH queries to be used. The config looked like this: ...

This is the second post on the series, if you haven’t seen the first post yet, I recommend you read it for some more context. The why and high level how This post is about the tools and frameworks I chose for Sharp Cooking Web. Frontend framework I wanted the new Sharp Cooking to be as close to a real mobile app as possible. Once it is installed, it should be able to run completely offline. To achieve this independence, I decided to use a SPA framework instead of an SSR framework. ...

This is going to be a series of posts about Sharp Cooking’s rewrite journey. I’m not sure yet how many parts it will take. In any case, part 1 is about the why and the high-level how. A bit of history When I’m not coding I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Cooking and baking have been a long-time passion of mine and I have dozens of recipes I’ve tweaked over the years. However, I’ve never found a good recipe book app to maintain my recipes. Thus, back in 2019 I created my own iOS and Android app and called it Sharp Cooking. The goal of Sharp Cooking is very simple: provide a simple yet attractive experience to users without ads or limits. If you haven’t seen the app at all, you can check it on Google and Apple stores: ...