CLI Data Gem Portfolio Project

When we were first assigned the CLI Data Gem Portfolio Project I was a bit anxious. I knew I had learned a lot over the past 5 or 6 weeks...but enough to build my own application? I was experiencing what might be considered a *mild* case of 'imposter syndrome'. Once I got started, however, it was evident that all the labs and code-alongs had paid off. I was successfully putting together my first Ruby program and having a lot of fun doing it.

The project, relatively speaking, is quite simple. That fact aside, it was exciting to build something that I created from scratch. Not just that, but a program that could pull data from an existing website and use said data to create new, malleable objects. I found myself thinking about the project even while I was away from my computer. While walking the dog or cooking dinner, I'd be thinking of possible refactors for a chunk of recently finished code. Or brainstorming what the best user-friendly features would be for an app of this kind. That's when it hit me...

I'm thinking like an honest-to-goodness software engineer. I'd not only picked up plenty of new coding skills thus far, but a mindset to put them to good use. Suddenly any and all symptoms of 'imposter syndrome' dropped away.

As I continued to build out my project, I learned more about usability. It was fun imagining how a first-time user might react to the way my application behaved. This led me to consider some more minute details beyond the code itself: pacing, phrasing, and spacing. I began going through each method to make sure the messages were coming in at a readable pace, and phrased in an easy-to-understand manner for any first-time user. I also made sure to puts out empty lines between commands and responses - this was to ensure there weren't endless blocks of text stacked on each other. I wanted to avoid the need for the user to go back and re-read sections to confirm they didn't miss anything.

All-in-all this was a valuable experience for someone new to Ruby coding. I learned a lot about taking the skills I've been taught and putting them to good use by building something practical. Beyond that, it taught me how to think like a user, and create a clean 'flow' for my application.