NutriBot Sally

Intention

I was trying to create a personal health assistant, telling people a little bit more about the food they eat every day. 

Context

I really like the idea of "You are what you eat". It is more about a balanced lifestyle instead of forcing to eat salad 24/7. Some food can be both tasty and healthy. I want my bot to help people to understand the food more. There are multiple calories/nutrition counts apps on the market already, and I was inspired by those. 

Process

I was searching for food-related APIs online, and then I found multiple nutrition-based or BMI-related ones. I decided to focus on nutrition because all the BMI gem I found were outdated. I only extracted the calories information from Edamam, the nutrition API I found, since I want to start with something easy and straightforward. 

Product

Basically, my nutrition bot can tell people food calories when they type in food name. I used the Edamam API to get the calories data, and I added Giphy API to send people fun error Gifs when people have invalid inputs (in this case, food that Edamam does not have any data). My link: https://secure-garden-10327.herokuapp.com/

Reflection

As a person who had zero coding background before this class, I had a hard time understanding the overall programming logic flow. Through this mid creative project, I finally have the feeling that all the pieces are coming together. Although my current bot is quite basic, I am happy about this create-from-scratch project. Truly appreciate the frustrations and bugs along the way!

** Need to use full screen to watch the complete demo video