“You are going to fail!” This was the first thing that came to mind when the time to do my first project with Flatiron arrived.
For so many reasons I thought I was not ready to embark in this project. For one, I had been overwhelmed with the twists and turns of live. So overwhelmed I paid very little attention to the classes, doing only the bare minimum to be able to submit tests and move on to the next lesson. But the time for the project came and there I was, scared and stuck.
For starters, I did not start the project until week two. For the project, we have two weeks for completion and submission. The first week I was still trying to finish labs and lessons leading up to the project. Second week came along and I read the instructions and 100% thought I had no abilities to build that project. Thankfully there are several video-instructions to follow along and start your project.
Once I started building my project, the first thing was set up the environment, you know the files and folders to hold your code and run your program. That was an epic fail! I tried to mix together what I remember from the videos and ended up removing files, moving them to a different folder, and just like that, the communication between files and folders was broken and I couldn’t load anything.
Next step for me was start from zero again. This time around I had read a ton and understood a little better the way things were supposed to be set up and what I should ‘require’ under which folder/file. So, the environment set up alone was a huge teaching lesson for me. The next step would be start coding.
I decided to test the environment and see if it was everything correct and running before starting to write code. Once I saw it was working, I started coding. To my surprise I knew more that I thought. Class, methods, and constants- it all came back to me and it felt right.
The most difficult part for me during the project was scraping. It took me a few rounds to figure out what I should be scraping. But I can tell you it felt really nice every time I felt I was a little closer to actually getting the data I wanted to scrape.
Looking back, I can hear in my head the words said by the coaches and instructors - “You’ve got this!”, “You can do it!”. In fact, we all can! Happy coding!