Flave

Flave is a recipe search engine we built as a team of six for our finals project at codesters.club. The idea was simple: help people find meals they could make using only the ingredients they already had at home.

I worked as the frontend developer, but my role stretched way beyond that. I set up the monorepo, handled DevOps, wired up the backend, and was in charge of making sure the frontend and backend played nicely together. I also worked closely with our designer to turn mockups into actual screens, and I was responsible for managing a lot of the state and error handling logic.

This was one of my first “big” projects — multiple people, many moving parts, weekly meetups, deadlines, priority lists, and constant iteration. What really stuck with me was how much I had to let go of my obsession with clean, abstract code. I used to rewrite things over and over trying to make them "perfect," but Flave taught me that working code matters more than clever code. Sometimes, good enough really is good enough — especially when you’re on a deadline and working with a team.

One thing I do regret, though, is that we didn’t plan for mobile early enough. We were so focused on getting the core experience working that we didn’t touch responsiveness until the MVP was basically done — and by then, it was too late. We had to cut our losses and leave the mobile version half-baked. But all in all, Flave taught me a ton about product thinking, team collaboration, and keeping things simple when they need to ship.