The week leading up to my CLI project was great! My cohort lead reviewed the basics of doing a scrape in a couple of study groups… we did a couple of object oriented scrapes as a group beforehand… I even had access to ton’s of video on the learn.instruct site(https://instruction.learn.co/student/video_lectures#/) to help!! It looked simple enough. Therefore, I planned a very ambitious project. Instead of the two level scrape that was required, I opted for a 4 level scrape!! And it was going to have great graphics, color, it was going to be fast and efficient, and well put together.
My 1st obstacle was changing my environment to the local environment. Just getting everything set up took almost a day, and researching how to move around in it doing this project took even more time. Manuvering Github was also challenge. Before now I had been avoiding working in the terminal using bash. I spent hours learning that also, and went to 2 study groups about it. Now I consider myself to be almost expert level Github and VS code lol.
Since we had a whole week to get this done, I started by watching Avi’s video, in my mind, he is the #1 expert, so I’m going to watch him closely, and analyze his methods, and his logic, that way I can start thinking like, a top developer. Well after about 4 hours into watching and coding along with his 1-hour long video, I realized he was only demonstrating a 1-level scrape!
That’s when I got a little nervous. I start looking up other cli project documentation, videos, anything I could find to help me to figure out how to get to the 2nd level. I skipped through a few of the CLI project videos… I still didn’t understand completely so, I decided to sit down and watch each of them thoroughly also(that took at least 15 hours). I also looked up tons of documentation online. I found this website to be particularly helpful in targeting attributes with Nokogiri: https://msp-greg.github.io/nokogiri/Nokogiri/XML/Attr.html
After a few more study groups and research I finally got the gem working and functional! What a relief!! What a sense of accomplishment!! Even though it was not quite as ambitious as I had hoped, I was happy and proud of it! It is a great gem and I learned many many lessons doing this! Some of which are:
Research research research, Learn to debug great – trial and error is all a part of coding, I’m not going to start off being a genius at this (what a surprise! … lol), I love creating, … and most of all …
I LOVE CODING!!!