(This was posted on the Learn.co blogging platform for my Phase 1 Flatiron School project; it is being cross-posted here due to the transition to Canvas and the removal of the Learn.co blogging function).
I have just completed my CLI Project! I had a little bit of a hard time getting started, mostly due to the decision between scraping and using an API. I had never used an API and felt unfamiliar with them. I had attended a few study group sessions and learned a little bit more about the pros and cons of scraping vs. using an API, and ultimately opted to use an API in my project. It was also a little bit new for me writing code without tests to pass, but it was a great learning experience.
Once I found a list of public APIs, the idea of building an app around drink recipes became very appealing, so this is what I ultimately chose. With the limited availability of bars and restaurants during 2020 and into 2021, I have been trying to experiment with at-home cocktail recipes. I figured I would actually potentially use this app in my real life outside of Flatiron School, so that became a bonus perk of this project.
Originally I had planned to only make this project about margarita recipes, but I was pushed by Dustin during study group to expand this to any drink recipe. I therefore was able to modify the code so the API would take any drink recipe input and, if valid, output a recipe with instructions for the user. This was a pretty cool unexpected feature I wasn’t planning on originally having, but made the project more fun and ultimately more useful.
Once I got the API class working, I moved on to displaying the objects. Once this worked, I also added the feature of asking for a new input if the user put in a drink that the API did not have a recipe for.
This project definitely taught me a lot about Object Oriented Ruby and I am happy to have synthesized my skills into this project. I was able to connect with peers I hadn’t met before and work with others and learned a lot at the CLI study group sessions. Now that I’ve completed the first project I feel more confident in my abilities to tackle the next ones and am more aware of the resources available to me.
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