Table of Contents
Client
RecipeCast is a self-founded Micro-SaaS platform designed for home cooks. It provides a modern solution for casting recipes to TVs and smart displays, offering a hands-free cooking experience that works with any recipe site.
Challenge
Home cooks faced constant frustration following the discontinuation of Google’s Cookbook app. I identified several key friction points that needed to be solved:
- Screen locks: Devices locking during cooking required constant unlocking with messy hands.
- Ad-heavy content: Finding actual recipe steps amidst ads on mobile sites was difficult.
- Hardware limitations: Small phone screens were hard to read from a distance while cooking.
- Lack of alternatives: No existing solution provided reliable casting to Google Cast-enabled devices.
Approach
I needed to architect a system that prioritized reliability and universality. The approach involved deep technical discovery into the Google Cast SDK and structured data parsing.
Authoritative Receiver Pattern
To handle the complexity of the Cast SDK, I designed an architecture where the cast receiver device controls all state to ensure synchronization.
Recipe Extraction
I built a priority-based extraction system deployed on Cloudflare Workers to handle the variance in recipe website structures.
Solution
I built a production-ready SaaS platform using Wasp (React + Node.js) that integrates seamlessly with a custom Google Cast implementation.
The solution focused on two core technical achievements:
- Reliable Cast Integration: Implementing an authoritative receiver architecture to maintain synchronized state, handle network interruptions, and manage session timeouts gracefully.
- Universal Parsing: A Cloudflare worker that behaves as a proxy that detects and extracts recipe data from over 200+ recipe sites and counting.