I was a little bit amibitious with this project and instead of doing a simple game collection app I decided to add functionality of tracking individual play sessions with information like dates, players, and winners. A lot of my early hurdles were just setting up the complex relationships I required for this. I ran into one particular problem with recording winners that I wanted to discuss here.
This project was difficult but really helped me grow as a programmer. I made a CLI that scrapes Ranker.com’s list of “The Greatest Albums of All Time”. Getting my program to scrape all the info I wanted was challenging and took a lot of trial and error but my biggest takeaway from this project was actually outside of coding. It was in file structure and project management. Everything up to this point has been presupplied by Learn with file structure and a test suite where you can do a minimal amount of coding to get everything working. This was a ground up project where I had to create the file structure, maintain a github repository and build everything from the ground up. I learned a lot while getting all the gem and file dependecies set up.
My life has been an ongoing battle between my more dominant “left-brain” (associated with analytical and methodical thinking) and my desire to be creative or around creative people. In high school I excelled in math and science. I loved puzzles and problem solving but I’d spend most of my free time on music. I attended Berklee College of Music with the intention of being a trumpet player but was quickly drawn to audio engineering. Recording was able to fulfill both sides of me. It was a very technical field but also let me be surrounded with artists and work creatively. That took me to LA where I made a career of it for several years before deciding to try something different.