The first version of Cookbook was an HTML file that lived in a chat: recipes in local storage, a shopping list, a few filters. It worked well enough that it deserved a home.
What the repo started with
- A dev server that serves the page and exposes one resource: the whole cookbook as JSON, read with GET and replaced with PUT.
- The page, split out of the artifact into its own files.
- The first fix. Ingredient names were keyed by their last word, so “rice vinegar” and “white vinegar” collapsed into one shopping-list line. The key became the full normalised name.
The illustrations
The artifact drew a little canvas illustration for each dish from its name. It was charming and wrong often enough to be distracting. The drawings were replaced by a single placeholder SVG, with the intention of letting people add their own photos later. Photos arrived nine days afterward.
Why it matters
Everything that followed, the phone shell, sign-in, AWS, the import tool, grew from this file. The one-resource API survived as the shape of the first cloud version too: the whole book as one document, replaced atomically.