Thoughts On My First Project A Year Later…

By Travis Scott Lee

My first project after entering the Flatiron School was write a command line program in Ruby. It was a crude app called PokeLearner, and extrapolated data from the Pokemon API. This app would give you a prompt to enter a number from 1–20 to learn from the first 20 Pokemon.

What it really does is that when you load the app, it loads the data through from the API through a HTTP request. Then, it takes that string of data and parses it into JSON, JavaScript Object Notation. Why we do this is because we want to make this API data as humanly readable as possible. After that, we convert this JSON into a Ruby object, so we can manipulate the data further. Then, once we want to read info about a certain Pokemon, it would make another HTTP request for that Pokemon’s data and parses into JSON. Once we get the JSON, the program will scrub the data of of certain regular expressions.

Even though it is my most crude program, it is the one I am most proud of. I came from knowing so little about programming at the time to knowing two different general programming languages and several different libraries and frameworks. Looking back on it, my main issue of creating my first app was debugging, now I think I could debug anything I create. I would like to thank my instructors at Flatiron School for getting me this far.