This blog post will contain my project notes, my thought process behind the days I was working on the project, and some written enthusiasm for the process.
Project notes:
- What is a wealthy person?
- A wealthy person has a name
- A wealthy person has a ranking
- A wealthy person has a description
- Want an object that has these properties that the CLI can just use
- Go to website, find the people
- Extract the properties
- Instantiate a person
Those were the things I wanted to do, and when I wrote down that list, it seemed easy, but my idea of “this shouldn’t be so bad!” took 5 days to complete, and it’s still not perfect code. I started writing this post on day 4.
I am on day 4! The first day, I made my flowchart and tried out some code while looking at a few references for similar projects. THAT WAS NOT THE RIGHT WAY TO GO!
By day 2, I had code that I didn’t full understand how to run. That was not the right way to approach building this. After talking to a friend on the slack channel, he told me it was imperative that I watch the videos on building basic CLI’s that are provided to us. Thank goodness he told me to do that!
On day 3, I watched half of the video, it was only 30 minutes but in order to code along, write notes, and understand what Avi was saying, I had to pause the video a bunch of times. So, 30 minutes in, but really, a couple hours in! It was so helpful, though. I understood more after watching that video than I did in a long time. Big win!
On day 4, I have a project that fully runs and works, after watching both of the videos and coding along - but there is something missing. My project, worlds wealthiest people, displays to the user a list of the 50 wealthiest people and their descriptions. The list shows their name and rankings. I want that data to be seperate, but I’m not sure what I did wrong with my CLI just yet. The user has the option to see all of that data together as a list, or exit. I’m just happy that it runs, and that I understand it up until this point!
I was going to submit just that, because I think it still met all the requirements, but I decided to turn in a project help form to see what I could improve so that the user could interact with the project more. Overall, I’ve put about…maybe 30 hours into this so far. And it has been…pretty fun and rewarding! I actually created new github repositories maybe 3 or 4 times…and even tried out an easier project idea! And I haven’t been too frustrated yet…good sign I should keep going and keep practicing!
STAY TUNED!
https://github.com/DahliaBloomstone/Worlds_Wealthiest_People
TO RUN IN TERMINAL: ./bin/Worlds-Wealthiest-People
This was a long day of working, and it is not a perfect CLI by any means. The data is sort of clunky. But I was so unclear on so much and doing all of this, collaborating on slack, watching videos, was all such an incredible experience. I am proud of my first project! It prompts the user for input, gives the user options, and (I think) the code is clear to me, but I am going to write line by line what the code is saying before I turn everything in.
OKAY! We are on day 5. By day 5, I had code that had a README with a description, install instructions, contributor’s guide, a link to the license for the code, a CLI interface that pulled data from an external source, a CLI that implemented both list and detail views, and some ruby essentials like basic control flow, variable scopes, instances, classes, object instantiation, the self keyword, method types, and iteration. Whew! It was quite a week of learning. It felt nothing like the labs - it was terrifying and fun to do this by myself. (But not really by myself, it just feels that way sometimes on self paced, but really, I had friends on slack who were willing to collaborate and talk!)
I can’t wait to move on and see what I could potentially improve, learn more, and start other projects! :)