My first portfolio project was definitely a study in rolling with the punches!! Not only did life throw me some hard hits during the time I was working on it, but my plans for my CLI Data Gem took some major blows.
I first thought to build a CLI that would allow users to search the New York Times Best Sellers list for reviews of books by author, genre and format, book title or by ISBN. I had to scale those plans back because it didn’t seem feasible to have all those search parameters. (I discovered later, during my review, that it was feasible and very doable.)
My CLI Data Gem isn’t pretty in appearance, but I was able to refactor my code to be concise and DRY!! After walking through the program several times, I removed anomalies and errors.
During my review, I found that I was able to explain the functions of the code better than I had anticipated.
The hardest part about the project was finding a starting point. For several days, I seemed to be in a coding brain freeze! Even though I had an idea about what I wanted to do, I was at a loss of how to begin!!
I took some great advice from my software-engineer son and finally just started with the greeting. Once I started, it was still slow going but the freeze began to thaw.
At first, I decided to use an API because I had a lot of trouble with the scraping lessons, but as the project progressed, I realized I would have to scrape a little to get the final reviews to print out to the user’s screen. The New York Times had an excellent public API to use which made the project easier. I was caught up by something that often trips me up: MAKING THINGS TOO DIFFICULT!! I was looking at the API demo project too closely and my project didn’t require all the code that was required in that one. Once I had a session with my instructor to check in and she pointed that out, I deleted much of my code and began to looking at it more simply.
The part that I had been the most anxious about, the scraping, actually was the easiest portion of the project!! Due to the way the API and the website was laid out, finding the right components to scrape only took about an hour!!
One of the major takeaways I have from this project is to trust my own instincts. I felt that I was making things too difficult and I also thought that there was a way to make my app do more. I should have trusted those thoughts and researched how to do that better. I also realized that I need to be more confident in my abilities to code.
All in all, I am proud of the gem but I would like to go back and expand it a little more later. I do feel like it is a repetitive program, as far as there is already such a thing out there, but as practice in learning how to code and build a gem, it was very beneficial.