My first solo project

Filipp Minayev
3 min readDec 4, 2020

I got to say when i was getting ready to start my phase 1 solo project with Flatirons, i was overwhelmed with fear and doubt. Mainly because i was faced with this, a blank page, scary am i right? Deciding on what my project was going to do and how the CLI was going to interact with the user, didn’t help much either.

Listening to other students and our awesome Ed coach i told myself. “Ok, i don’t need to make it the most awesome program in the world, i just need to make it simple.” I started by finding some online APIs that i could use with my project. After checking out a lot of different APIs i finally decided on what i was going to use. The user of my CLI would be able to list all of the characters in ‘The Breaking Bad’ tv series and be able to pull up information about the character the user chooses. With that in mind i started creating the project, which surfaced another road block, what do i start coding??

Our instructor shared a goal checklist doc that i found super helpful. I started the project by just creating all the files that i would be needing and setting up my environments and gems. Returning to our past recorded lectures came in handy for getting my CLI setup. Since i was using an API that contains all the information, I just needed to setup a way to get a list of characters and their individual information. I used a Ruby gem called RestClient to get that information.

Once i was receiving the desired information, i began to code what i was going to do with that information. I made a class method that would store that data and initiate on a new Characters class. The Characters class would take each part of that data for example (“char_id”, “name”, “birthday”, “occupation”, “status”) and store it inside the instance variables on initialize.

After getting over those few bumps in the road with getting data and figuring out what inside the data i wanted to use for the program, i started focusing on the user experience with my CLI project. From the user being greeted with a welcome message to receiving a friendly error message if they had typed in a wrong prompt, and even adding a little flare to my code and having it run like and old school program.

All in all from start to finish i really enjoyed making this project even with the challenges i faced. Without challenges there would be no change.

“It’s lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believed in myself.” ​- Muhammad Ali

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