This project was originally created for a writing competition in August 2022. I published it on a different platform, but now I’ve decided to repost it to my personal, public blog to showcase this project to a wider audience.
Data analytics and coding is my bread and butter. It’s what put food on the table in my house. So I thought, what better way to talk about it than to build you a demonstration you can explore yourself?
Do you cook? Do you use recipe sites? Have you ever wondered, “Gosh, how can I know what’s the best soup to make?” If you answered yes to all three of these questions, then boy do I have good news for you!
Let me introduce you to Soup’s On! An interactive website where you get to explore a dataset of over 8,000 soup recipes available on food.com.
How do you want to determine which recipes are worth looking at? Is there an ingredient you absolutely MUST include in your soup? Well, you’re in luck, you can decide to filter the recipes based on a must-have ingredient, the number of user ratings, the actual rating, and cooking time!
But wait, there’s more! Once you’ve filtered the data based on your preferences, you can also compare the results on a scatter chart, using information on rating, number of voters, cooking time, number of ingredients, and number of steps, and decide which of these you want on your x axis, and which you want on the y axis! If that’s not enough for you, you can also sort the data on two of these items, to determine how you want to order your top ten soups!
And just look at how sweet the charts look!
Once you’re happy with your top ten recipe list, use the “Select Recipe” drop-down menu to browse through the information about each of the recipes.
What information will this website tell you about the top-ten recipes, according to your chosen settings? You’ll discover the ingredients you’ll need, the number of steps in the recipe, minutes to cook the soup, the user rating, and how many people voted on the recipe.
Then, once you’ve found the recipe you want to make, click the link to check out the recipe on food.com!
Don’t believe me how good this site is?
Try it for yourself!
In all seriousness, during the pandemic, I took a data analytics boot camp through UC Berkeley and learned the skills to build this website. Taking the boot camp was the smartest decision I made during the pandemic, because it led to me completely changing careers. It led to me becoming a curriculum engineer, working on improving the curriculum of the same boot camp I took, so I got to source data to build charts like these and code in Python or JavaScript pretty regularly. I hope you will go and play around with it, because I had a lot of fun coding it to make it all interactive and fun for you!
Check out the source code to see what it took to develop this content. And if you’re at all curious as to what the raw data looks like in a table, you can check out the initial analysis and exploration I did using Python’s Pandas and Matplotlib libraries.
