Projects - Green Gobblin'

4th Year Integrated Masters Project

Built as part of the group project module Genesys at the University of Sheffield, the aim of this website was to encourage people to think more about the impact different lifestyles can have on our planet.

Green Gobblin' is a recipe sharing website where you can create, view, search for and comment on recipes, as you might expect from a number of similar sites. The twist here is that your recipe's CO2 impact will be measured and scored based on how many kilograms of CO2 are generated per kilogram of food.

The user is given categories for each ingredient they add to a recipe, which corresponded to the dataset we used for calculating climate impact. We then give a breakdown including the score for the whole recipe, as well as how much an individual ingredient contributes towards it.

Development was completed under an iterative Agile process with 2-week sprints, with regular standups and a kanban board for task management and assigning work. Although we were instructed to use Agile as part of the module, I feel we truly embraced it. We had defined criteria for moving through each column in the kanban board and effectively split our work up into manageable user stories. We prioritised stories based on their impact to the user and although we didn't complete every feature we envisioned at the start, the final product was still feature-rich and stable.

Within the module, we were tasked with generating ideas based on a choice of prompt ('Helping people make their lives more sustainable'), conducting customer research, and planning how the website could function in the 'real world' as a business. Having produced a landing page and again analysing how users responded to the idea, we spent our second semester producing a usable version of the website.

The site is built in Rails 6, with a PostgreSQL database. We made extensive use of both unit testing with RSpec and end-to-end testing with Capybara, so much so that we needed to request a longer timeout for our CI builds! The frontend layout makes use of Bootstrap 4, with libraries like cocoon and simple_form enabling us to produce it in the time constraint.

We attained a 1st-class grade for the project, and it was one of the most fulfilling parts of my 4th year!

(Screenshots and video demo coming soon!)