*“There is no way I know enough to do this!”
“I am going to fail in grand epic fashion!”
“They are going to think I never studied any of this and I know nothing.”
“What am I even doing here?” *
These were just some of the negative thoughts that swirled around in my brain before tackling my first project at FlatIron. I was assured I was not alone in this beginner’s mind set, even if it did feel like that at times.
This first project involved making a Ruby CLI app that is run through the computer’s terminal. We had to scrape data from an internet source to use inside the program. This was accomplished by using the Ruby Gem “Nokogiri”.
I decided to make a program that gave the user access to weird and interesting facts. Lets face it everyone loves to say “Did you know….yada, yada, yada. Its good for conversation starters and ice breakers.
First task was to find sources that could be easily scraped for data and parsed. It wasn’t too hard. I ended up using three different sites for my collection of facts.
Next I had to set up a file tree for my program. Again, this wasn’t as difficult as it first seems. The Bundler gem takes most of the guess work out of this. All I had to do was make a separate config folder for my environment file. This seemed to be a more organized way of doing this.
Then I sat down and pseudo-coded what I wanted to do and how I wanted the program to act. This step took a lot of guess work and frustration out of the equation.
Time to code this out. Little by little and bit by bit it started to come together. I was actually amazed.
The Key Points I took away from this project:
-
Do not psych yourself out. Break the project down into smaller, more digestible pieces. Take those mountains and turn them into mole hills.
-
Do not be afraid to ask for help. There are people around willing to give advice and help you get unstuck. Never code in isolation. Don’t be that person.
-
Error messages are our friend. Its almost like following a breadcrumb trail. Fix an error to get another error is a good thing. Eventually the errors will be eliminated.
-
Make sure you take breaks both mentally and physically from the task at hand. The first day working on the project I sat for a solid 7 hours trying to figure things out. I only ended up exhausted, frustrated and in a bad mood. Of course it wasn’t until I step away that ideas started popping into my head of t heir own accord. Being persistent and pig-headed are two very different things.
To be completely honest it was kind of weird. I convinced myself I didn’t know enough to pull this project off. But once I got into the meat of it my brain started calling back to previous lessons and things started to work themselves out. So in short…..
Trust the Process