As anyone new to web development can attest to, starting something from scratch can be a turn off and very intimidating. Prior to starting this project, I was used to having set of instructions and test specs to guide me to completion. Upon reading through the requirements for my first portfoio project, my brain almost went into full meltdown mode.
Luckily, for students of the Web Development Immersive, Avi put together a walkthrough to get started. In short, what I gathered was to start with the end in mind and work in steps towards that end goal.
My initial plan was to scrape the most streamed songs on Spotify for the month of May, but after further investigation, I thought the project would be too similar to the Music Library CLI. I decided to settle on scraping Rottentomatoes’s top 100 highest rated movies instead.
I thought the page looked simple enough but after inspecting it I found that the task of scraping the page would be more complicated than I anticipated. I knew what I wanted to scrape but mainly due to the fact that there were no classes that defined each table, it threw me off. After finding some help on Slack I was able to find a way to extract what I wanted through looping through the table.
The next hurdle I found was getting my scraped information to work with my CLI folder. This took a good chunk of my time and was a huge headache. When I couldn’t figure out how to do this, I took the rest of the day off from the project and chose to enjoy some time out in the sun. After coming back to my project with fresh eyes, I was able to figure out that I had to put my scraper method within the call method where my CLI was being run. Once I was able to figure this out, the rest of the project fell into place.
Completing my first portfoloio project has instilled more confidence in myself as a developer. Although I feel very accomplished for completing this project, I still feel that there is more work that needs to be done in terms of improving my code. In addition, I feel that my grasp of technical language can also be improved.
Things I learned
- Keep it simple stupid
- Mr. Google will always be your best friend
- Studying and understanding other people’s code is the best way to improve
- Start with the end in mind and write out pseudocode or steps to get there
- Take breaks and recharge if the project is not going your way.