This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend
What I Built
I built PocketPal, a private meal planner for [friend’s name or relationship], who [describe the real meal-planning problem they face].
PocketPal lets them save ingredients to avoid, browse a small recipe box, and plan meals for the week. Recipes are filtered against their avoid list, and an optional local AI feature can suggest another meal using ingredients they have on hand.
Demo
[Try PocketPal] https://pocketpal-eight.vercel.app/
Code
[View the source on GitHub] https://github.com/rohini-ray/PocketPal.git
How I Built It
PocketPal is a static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript app. It stores the food profile and meal plan in the browser, and its service worker can cache the app shell for offline use.
For optional AI suggestions, PocketPal connects to Ollama running on the user’s own computer. The app can use an open-weight model such as qwen2.5:3b; the model is optional, and the planner and recipe box work without it.
Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
Dietary preferences and pantry details can be personal. PocketPal keeps them in the user’s browser, and local model inference means meal suggestions don’t need to send that information to a hosted AI service.
Using an open-weight model also lets the user choose which model to run. The trade-off is that they need to download the model and have a computer capable of running it. PocketPal’s ingredient checks are only a convenience; they can miss synonyms, hidden ingredients, and cross-contamination, so users still need to verify labels themselves.
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