Sometimes you gotta fail to succeed. And that's what exactly happened to my first project.
I failed. I haven't had my assessment with my lead yet but I already know I failed. I've been going over all the mistakes I made the past 72 hours. I didn't utilize my time right. I didn't utilize the resources available to me. I let my stubbornness get in the way and didn't ask for help. I stayed on a problem for hours on end trying to solve it.
The project involves using OOP to create a web scraping tool that pulls data from a website and allows the user to view that data in the terminal. It had to be two levels deep (For example, selecting from a list of purses and then seeing the details and price) and cover all basics in terms of usability (the program respond the way it should be). Along with that we get to create a GEM, which helps with loading all the dependencies requires for your CLI and scraper to function, along with giving it a single command to make everything run.
My Gem works. My CLI works. My scraper doesn't work.
And I tried. I stayed up for many hours trying to get it to work. I spent all of my sleepless weekend and even took off work to get it working. But I was trying desperately to make the program work that I wasn't focusing on understanding what I was doing to try to get it to work. Then I got frustrated and would delete the entire thing and start over. I think I changed my entire code around about 6 or 7 times.
But I finally figured it out today on the way to work. The problem is that when my code runs, it's not executing the 2nd part of my code to display the details of of the items (in the case, laptops). I'm not calling the CSS classes for the scraper properly in order for it to pass through the CLI.
Now that I know, I can learn. I meet with my tech lead to do the assessment and from there I'll probably will get a second chance at passing it. But instead of being nervous I'm more motivated. Tired, but motivated.
I look forward to sharing my project with you all once I get it fixed.
Top comments (1)
This is essential. Looking back at what happened and forming ideas on how to improve is a huge skill to learn, difficult though it is to look at something we just did that isn't working. There's about a thousand platitudes about this, and while most of them are true (or "truthy"), it doesn't make it easier to swallow. So good on you for writing this! Well done! And you already figured out the problem, which is awesome. You're on track, you're doing this!