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Samantha DeMotta
Samantha DeMotta

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Coding My First Javascript Project

Beginning the Project

Starting off, last week was rough. Last week we started working on our final project for our Phase 1 endpoint and when I tell you I was stressed, it's an understatement.Between working through 40 hours during the week and coding when I got off, I truly thought to myself "I'm never going to be able to get this done" .

Photo by Matt Popovich on Unsplash

What I wanted to accomplish

When it came time to turn in our project proposals we were given multiple different APIs to choose from and the possibilities were endless. Upon going through and checking what each one was my eyes landed on a specific one that made me so very excited. The API I had chosen had all the information everyone could ever want on Studio Ghibli Films and productions starting from the mid 80's to present.Now, I'm not speaking for everyone, but let me tell you I absolutely adore Hayao Miyazaki's animated worlds. That's why I chose the API I chose. I wanted to be excited to code and create something amazing with it. Now my original plan was to create a page that when you searched for a specific creature,location, film,etc., it would pull up descriptions for everything.

Photo by Heliberto Arias on Unsplash

What the App actually does

So what the app I created does differs drastically from what I originally wanted to do. My app essentially searches through Studio Ghibli Films and returns the English title as well as the kanji and romanized Japanese titles. It also displays the release year and give you a short description of what the films plot is.

What could have gone better and lessons learned

Once i got into the actual coding of everything i was super confident in what I was going to accomplish and as time went by that lessened. Every time I thought I was going somewhere something wasn't working whether it be a syntax error or the jousting match i had with this event listener Now when I say a Jousting match, I truly mean a battle. Every time I fixed one thing another popped up to the point that I erased all of the code I had written in my Javascript file and redid it 3 TIMES. Finally , after receiving assistance from a couple classmates, I finally ended up with something capable of running properly. Now, as for lessons learned, I truly learned patience that when going through my code to search for any error that may have been missed, I needed to take more time trying to figure out the actual problem instead of just starting over. I also learned that when going through the coding process I needed to take a little more time in the planning stage and make more of a clear layout of how I wanted everything to be accomplished as well as separating the functions i had into multiple functions instead of having 1 function do like 8 different things.

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