Meal Planner App Finish-up-a-thon Submission

This is a submission for the GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon Challenge

What I Built

I revived and completed a collaborative Meal Planner application that I originally started during Global Hack Week.

The goal of the project is simple: help individuals and families organize meals and grocery shopping in one place. Users can plan meals using weekly and monthly calendar views, create grocery lists, and collaborate with family members through shared groups.

When the hackathon ended, the project was left unfinished. While the UI and basic functionality existed, some of the most important features weren't working properly. Authentication through Google Sign-In was unreliable, family collaboration wasn't functional, and the application wasn't deployed for easy testing and use.

For this challenge, I decided to finally finish what I started and turn the prototype into a working application.

Demo

Github repo - https://github.com/nikol-damyanova/Meal-Planning-App
Video walkthrough - https://youtu.be/eUTqDaRzV7A

The Comeback Story

This project began during Global Hack Week and was originally built using Figma Make with a Supabase backend.

After the event ended, I stopped working on it because I was about to start a new term at university, and several critical pieces were still incomplete:

• Google authentication was looping. Only email logins were supported.
• Family groups could not be created.
• Sharing grocery lists with other users wasn't working.

For the Finish-Up-A-Thon Challenge, I revisited the project and focused on completing the missing pieces rather than starting something new.

The biggest change was migrating the backend from Supabase to Firebase. This migration allowed me to simplify authentication, improve reliability, and better support the collaborative features I originally envisioned.

The completed improvements include:

• Migrated backend infrastructure from Supabase to Firebase
• Fixed Google Sign-In using Firebase Authentication
• Implemented fully functional family groups
• Enabled shared grocery list management
• Added invite sharing through links and QR codes
• Deployed the application using Firebase Hosting and built apk for android.
• Published and documented the project on GitHub

The difference between the original version and the finished version is that the application is now something people can actually use rather than a partially working prototype.

My Experience with GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot played a significant role in helping me finish this project.

I used Copilot CLI while working through the backend migration and troubleshooting authentication issues. It helped me understand Firebase configuration requirements, generate implementation boilerplate, identify integration problems, and accelerate repetitive coding tasks.

Copilot was especially useful when migrating functionality from Supabase to Firebase because it provided suggestions tailored to the Firebase ecosystem and helped me adapt existing code instead of rewriting everything from scratch.

The biggest benefit wasn't generating code from scratch, rather it was helping me move faster through debugging, configuration, and integration work that often slows down project completion.

This challenge was a good reminder that finishing a project can sometimes be more valuable than starting a new one.