February Start to Finish

Housekeeping

At the beginning of January, I wrote The first After-School Project that focused on how I would build my personal website. I learned a lot about simple, static, website designs and I still intend to keep working on that site and learn more about web hosting so I can move off GitHub pages, at least for my newer projects that aren't static. However, I'd like to talk about something besides that - namely, my newest project, and what I plan to have finished by the end of February.

We can easily ascertain the goal of most fledgling developers because it tends to be the goal of almost everyone in my position: find fulfilling, well-paying work in my field of choice. Namely: web development. To that end, I need to build up a portfolio of projects that I can show off as proof of my strong, unending deluge of programming skills.

Ok ok ok, that's enough housekeeping, let's talk about my project.

The Project

So this is a Discord bot. It's not terribly removed from what I've worked on before since I also worked a little on MHTimerBot adding a new feature and creating tests, as well as simple bug fixes.

Currently, the bot has 1 2-in-1 feature.

Right now, you can type ai nyaa and then a search keyword, and the bot will scour nyaa.si looking for hits that match your keyword. Then, you can react to the post and get a link to the download of the hit you're looking for.

You can take a look at the project here:

fluentinstroll / RayAi

Ray's Discord bot, meant to do whatever he finds to be needed - built in an entirely selfish way.

RayAi

Personal Discord Bot

RayAi is being built to facilitate whatever random things I want to have access to in a discord bot.

Features included:

nyaa.si lookup:

• type ai nyaa <search string> to get the first 10 results of the nyaa.si search
• react to the search to get a torrent link to the cooresponding item

View on GitHub

Goals

What I'd like to do now that I've introduced my new project is lay out some goals that I'd like to achieve by the end of February.

1. Implement my second feature into RayAi

Right now I have 1 real feature and I'd like to bump that up to 2 by the end of the month. My plan for the next feature is Monster Hunter related, I'd like to allow users to look up a monster or hunt, or something of the like and see possible drops or rewards. There can be a lot here and perhaps I can expand a command like this to multiple features but for now I'd like to stick to lookup hunt/monster to see rewards/drops.

2. Move my personal website to a better url

So for now I'm using fluentinstroll.github.io but that doesn't look great on an Indeed profile or a resume. To that end, I purchased a domain that better represents me and I plan to move my personal website to that.

I don't really know how to do that yet but at some point this month and look into it and quickly get it done.

3. Start on a React project

The next thing I want to do is learn more about how Reactjs works and how to build React apps. I have a couple of ideas for this but I'll keep them to myself for now. The goal for this is not to finish something substantial but to start something substantial that will have potential and will show off my abilities well.

Even if I get into March with a started project but not a full realized one, I'll consider this a success but I still intend on doing as much work on it as I can and hopefully can have a 0.1.0 release finished in time for March.

4. Refactor the RayAi code

Right now RayAi is a learning experience that I've learned a lot from but it's not necessarily a great example of stellar code. I think I need to refactor my current code, maybe even before working on the new feature, so that I can outline good practices for going forward.

A 4.1 for this might be to add a linter and code formatter to help keep the code uniform as well.

Conclusion

That's all I have to say for this blog, I think I laid out a decent number of attainable objectives here and I feel that I really can get this finished. Look forward to my end of February/ beginning of March blog post where I decide if I succeeded or failed in my quest to do literally any work.