Lab 01 · iPhone & iPad
BaoBei Kitchen
Everything between wanting to cook and actually eating, in one app.
Save a recipe from a link, a photo, or a page of a cookbook, and it lands in one library with sections, photos and a cook log. Plan the week from what you've collected, turn that plan into a grocery list, send the list to Reminders, then log what you actually made. It syncs across your own iPhone and iPad over iCloud, shares recipes by link, and works with no signal at all.
A week of cooking is one continuous loop: browse, collect, plan, shop, cook. Mine was scattered across five places, a browser tab, a screenshot, a notes app, a paper list and memory. Kitchen holds the whole loop in one app so the week takes less negotiating and leaves more room for the part that's actually a pleasure.
And cooking is rarely solo. v2.0 opened the loop to the whole group, so a plan and a list are held between everyone instead of living on one person's phone.
Five months of continuous releases, run like a small product org of one. Every feature starts in a planning session that settles scope, edge cases and architecture, then goes to a separate implementation session as a written directive. The journal calls it one for thinking, one for doing.
- OCT 2026v2.0Shared kitchensLatest
One meal plan, one grocery list and a shortlist, shared by any group that cooks together. Invite by link, react with a thumbs up, see who picked up what. Built on iCloud, with no new account.
- v1.3Sections, scale, and a test suite
Recipe sections, combining recipes, photo reorder and covers. Hardened for 500-recipe libraries, editor split into testable parts, iPhone landscape, and the first 95 automated tests.
- v1.2Cookbooks, photographed
Import from photos and cookbook pages with on-device text recognition. Editor and ingredient overhaul; first code-health drain.
- v1.1Off one device
iCloud sync, recipe sharing by link, iPad layouts, share extension. Nine of those days were an iPad responsive arc nobody planned.
- APR 2026v1.0Feature complete in seven days
Library, unit conversion, grocery list, Reminders export and the meal plan, from first keystroke to App Store approval in a week. 104 commits. The app was 10% of the work; metadata, docs, policy and screenshots were the rest.