Summer of 2019
This summer I took part in Bash Festival, which was a week long coding festival for Teens across many places in the UK. We would spend the week building cool projects, then travelling to Birmingham for the finale.
The first day of the week consisted of a lot of networking and ice-breakers. A funny coincidence was I ended up being in a team with 2 other people who I had already known which made this process a lot easier. We were given the opportunity to network and get to know everyone at the event: getting to know their favourite programming languages. Mine at the the time being Python, HTML and CSS.
After a lot of idea generating we all decided on projects we wanted to do. Throughout the week we had many mentors who would help us, so I decided to make the project which I had previously wanted some help with.
My idea was to solve a problem I always faced. I took Food Tech at school and was always being given paper recipes. However, I was always losing them. So, I needed somewhere to store my recipes. This was a common problem within my Food Tech class and we were always having to send pictures of the recipes.
So during the week festival I created a HTML website which stored your recipes. I named it Cayenne Kitchen after one of my favourite ingredients – Cayenne Pepper. The user would click ‘new recipe’ and type their recipe into the website. It would then be stored in a database and fetched everytime the user wanted to view the recipe. The user would have the ability to share or print the recipe to others.
I built the front end of the website quickly and established a base for where the recipes would be inputted and built. The HTML and CSS was the easiest bit of the entire project and enabled me to improve my web design and HTML knowledge. The harder part was the backend which would involve using a database and also fetch and pull requests. As suggested by the mentors, I began reading documentation to see how I could move forward. I broke the problem down into 3 problems. Sending the recipe somewhere, storing it somewhere and then bringing it back so the user could view it.
I chose to use ‘AirTable’ as my database as my project didn’t need a lot of storage and AirTables documentation was easy to understand.
After a lot of reading and troubleshooting I successfully managed to complete my website – .
At Bash we also had a range of talks which we could listen to and I enjoyed them all.
Examples of talks I attended: I attended a talk on ethics in technology exploring Siri, Alexa and technology. There was also a talk on MongoDB (another database), Rolls Royce and GitHub.
The next step for the Cayenne Kitchen project would be to incorporate an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) so a user is able to scan a picture of a recipe and it would be inputted into the website automatically without the user having to type.
I enjoyed taking part in Bash Festival and enjoyed working with all the mentors.
Mutsa Pearl 