Launched a total rebuild of Kulinarian.com

I spent the last year working nights and weekends completely rewriting and re-designing Kulinarian.com. After working on Kulinarian for 7+ years, it was time to fully purge the legacy code and start over. I don’t always advocate for completely rebuilding a site or app, but the original code was such a mess that it was holding me back and preventing me from developing new features and fixing bugs.

The previous site used PHP and Laravel 4.2 for the backend (the very first version of Kulinarian back in 2007 was CodeIgniter!). And the UI was Bootstrap SCSS and jQuery, which was a nightmare. I’m primarily a backend engineer, so UI dev can spiral out of control for me.

The new version uses Python 3 and Django 2, with the Django Rest Framework powering all requests. And the UI is a React and Mobx SPA, and I used create-react-app which is fantastic. Using React has been amazing, I find UI dev to be so much easier with a stateful component framework.

So far the results have been awesome and the users have been very happy with the updates. Now I can finally start developing more advanced recipe features.