So, I've been working my way through Codecademy's Computer Science course and have just finished the portion about data structures and algorithms. To end this portion, I must complete a portfolio project using what I've learned to create a recommendation software.
The objectives of this project were:
- Store data in a data structure
- Use an algorithm to sort or search for data within a data structure
- Use Git version control
- Use the command line and file navigation
- Write a technical blog post on the project
For this project, I decided to go with something I love: horror! I decided I would write a program that would recommend a horror movie based on tags chosen by the user.
I decided to use a MaxHeap data structure and heapsort algorithm to keep track of movies that satisfy the user's chosen tags. The movie data was stored in a dictionary with the movie name as the key and the corresponding tags in a list stored as the value. All the tags the user could choose from were also stored as strings in a list. I decided to use an altered implementation of the MaxHeap data structure and heapsort algorithm supplied by Codecademy to better suit the program's needs.
After using a while loop to get the user-supplied tags, I went and linked all the movies that satisfy those tags in a dictionary object, making sure to only include those movies that satisfy multiple user-selected tags.
I then changed that dictionary to a list of tuples with the name of the movie as the first index and the number of tags the movie satisfies as the second. After sorting through the list with a heapsort algorithm, I then returned the top three movies that satisfy the most tags to the user.
One problem I ran into was altering the heapsort algorithm and the MaxHeap data structure to suit my needs. Especially since there were no errors detected by my IDE, I needed to go back through and debug only to find out it was a logic error!
All in all, this was a fun project to work on and I learned a lot! Especially when it came to list comprehensions, which I did not know could also be used with a dictionary. I also worked with the .join() string method more than I ever had before in order to properly display all the lists and dictionaries I was using.
Surprisingly, the most time-consuming feature of this project was the creation of the movie data because I had to decide what kinds of tags to use and what would be most relevant to the user.
Go ahead and give it a try and see if there is anything that I could improve upon! Feedback is very appreciated!
Github: https://github.com/MozzarellaMonster/Recommendation-Software
Replit: https://replit.com/@MozzarellaMonst/Horror-Movie-Recommendation-Software?v=1
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