KitchenBuddy
Guiding a university student through the end-to-end development of his final exam project.
This mentorship project involved guiding a university student ('Leonardo') through the end-to-end development of his final exam project: KitchenBuddy. The application, built with React Native and Expo, is a comprehensive smart-fridge management system handling ingredients, expiration dates, barcode scanning (via OpenFoodFacts), and dynamic UI rendering based on ripeness intervals.
Project Snapshot
- Role
- React Native Mentor
- Student
- Leonardo
- Period
- 2025
Thinking Like an Architect
Rather than writing his code for him, I guided Leonardo in breaking the app into reusable pieces and deciding together where data should live, so his codebase stayed readable under exam pressure.
Learning to Tame State
When data kept vanishing on app close, I showed him how to reason about how information flows and why it has to persist on the device - the hardest lesson, and the one that truly unblocked him.
Connecting to the Real World
We worked through his first integration with an outside service (OpenFoodFacts) and the device camera together, weighing what to build himself versus when to trust a third-party API.
Key Contributions & Skills
Guided the architecture of a robust React Native (Expo) app, ensuring strict TypeScript definitions and clean UI component trees.
Taught best practices for advanced state management, barcode scanner APIs, and offline payload persistence across executions.
Debugged complex React rendering flows and solved styling/layout issues impacting the student's exam deliverables.
Provided strategic problem-solving that led the student to pass a complex academic software engineering exam.