I’m just a touch obsessed with self-improvement.
I pretty much devour any book, article, or video on the topic that I can get my hands on. I think we can learn so much from reading about the thoughts and experiences of others. Anything that you’ve dreamt of doing, there’s probably someone out there who’s already done it, and you can learn from them. You can hear them out, hopefully avoid their mistakes and try the advice they offer. The resources we have available to us today are incredible. It has inspired me to create a program that would draw some of these resources together and offer a single platform to access this content. Inspiro is an inspirational program that allows users to choose from different forms of content to spark their thoughts and passions. It draws videos from Ted Talks, articles from Goalcast, and Quotes from wiseoldsayings.com, making it easier for users to view all of this content quickly.
The Process
I was beyond excited to begin this passion project and create something of my own. I did plenty of research to get some ideas, and after planning exactly what I wanted to achieve and my thoughts on how to do it, I started writing my code. It was a long process, but the first day was mostly one of excitement. After running into some consistent hurdles, I reached out for some advice from JJ Seymour, and he helped me narrow down my CSS selectors for scraping the websites, and we worked on debugging with the binding.pry method, pretty much my favorite thing ever. After thirty minutes of talking to JJ, I felt fired up to keep working through my ideas.
Alas, I had my scraper class and the types of content themselves (video, article, and quote classes) working! It took me awhile, but victory was sweet. The next step was to make sure all of the classes were talking to each other correctly. I spoke with Corinna Brock Moore about some examples and how to make sure that my program worked properly. After playing around with it on my own, I got it all finally working! I was pretty much walking on air at that point. I had a couple minor formatting issues, but nothing that gsub and a little work couldn’t fix.
I can’t say that I didn’t struggle at all to create the app. The hardest part was the frustration of those first few hurdles. Thankfully I had JJ and Corinna to talk through my problems- programming is so much better when you’re able to talk it through with someone. I essentially either felt incredible or terrible at any given moment about my progress as I feel like this photo accurately represents:
Despite the frustrations, I’m so excited and proud of my app!
If you’re interested in seeing the final product and how it all works, watch the walkthrough here: https://youtu.be/Lpr2sYvQwLE