Veghacker
Log the vegetables you eat
After a year and a half of using Veghacker diligently every day, I finally realised it was giving me very little value. The information I logged was interesting, but not actionable in any way. Clearly, as I was the only user, anyone else who had tried it had found the same thing.
Still, it was a great learning experience in terms of building an app. I'm going to repurpose the code to make Fithacker, an exercise logging app which I'm already finding much more useful because I can easily look back and see what type of exercise I most need to do today.
I could see myself using this app for the rest of my life! Perhaps I won't be the only user this time.
It has taken me over a year to build the Veghacker MVP in roughly 1 hour per week of spare time. Progress has been glacial, but I have discovered some upsides to having such limited capacity:
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I’ve had 10x more thinking time than coding time. I prioritise ruthlessly so that I never waste precious coding time building features that aren’t absolutely necessary.
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It’s forced me to choose a very fast, lightweight tech stack so that can do useful work even when I only have a few minutes to spare. Sometimes, I don’t even open a code editor - I can tweak code directly in GitHub using my phone and within a few seconds Netlify has deployed it for me 😲
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I have had a whole year of using the app myself. I’ve used it every day, even though it barely functioned until recently. It was always a “solving my own problem” kind of app, and I have validated that it works for me.
Now that all the core features are in place, I’m going to be inviting a few people to give me feedback. If you are reading this, you are one of those people 😉
Open https://veghacker.app on your phone and record the vegetables that you’ve eaten. Your objective is to eat an array of veg every week, so try it for a week or two and let me know what you think 😃
I just added the crucial feature that gets me a giant leap closer to MVP launch.
You can now log in to veghacker.app and your data will be saved so that you can use Veghacker on multiple devices.
I've used Supabase.io (the open-source alternative to Firebase) as the backend and I love it! So good to be able to add auth, db, storage, cloud functions etc. without vendor lock-in.
Now I just need to do a little testing and tidying, so that it's presentable for my first users.
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I always found that logic to be a fallacy. You do have vendor lock-in, you are locked into to Supabase.io instead of Firebase. It's possible there is actually a good reason to use Supabase instead, but that reason is never going to be "avoiding vendor lock-in".
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Nice! What made you decide on using Supabase over Firebase?
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I like that Supabase is built on open source tech and I could transfer my database to another provider if I needed to. Also, I like playing with new things and Veghacker is an opportunity for me to experiment.
If you're looking for a really tried and tested backend with tonnes of features, Firebase would be a better choice right now.
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Even though I haven't had a chance to work on Veghacker since December, I have still been using it every day, so that's a good sign.
I had a bit of time off from my day job this week, so I created a logo and sorted out the basics of making Veghacker a PWA that can be installed on your phone's home screen.
This is not even an MVP yet, but it's usable.
As well as being an app that I want to use and share, Veghacker is a sandbox for me to try the latest and greatest front-end development stack.
For the MVP of Veghacker I'm using Vite, Vue3 and Typescript to build a PWA. I've used Vue before, but this is the first time I've used this super-modern combination of tools.
This was the day I started logging the types of vegetables that I eat every day to see it was a sustainable and motivating habit for me.
I created my own list of vegetables with a three-letter code for each of them and recorded each day in a handwritten JS file directly on GitHub.
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