Leading up to my first portfolio project at Flatiron, I felt a bit overwhelmed to be honest. The tasks seemed daunting from the sound of it. Multiple files, the dependencies, library and bin, gemspec, etc. Getting all of these up and running from scratch… I thought to myself where do I start? How I am ever going to create this from a blank slate, at least give me the base files to work with… What about API’s, which one do I use!?!?!?
Then I took a step back, gathered my thoughts, laid out an action plan. First things first - review the videos in learn, code along with the videos to get the foundation. The rest was history, as is with many things, the hardest part was convincing yourself to get started!
I found myself all over google, searching for errors I had never encountered before nor read about it. Permission denied? No biggie, chmod +x will fix it. File not found? make sure you’re running commands in your file, start with “cd __” (not cb) then your gem’s name. Don’t forget to use binding.pry when you’re not getting any data from your API (this was the first time I actually found myself using pry). You want to make sure you’re at least getting the html code in your terminal, then figure out which objects you’ll be using from that.
At the end, what appeared so daunting in the beginning turned out to be something quite simple. You really can create something from nothing in a short amount of time as long as you’re not scared to look and convince yourself to get started.
Take a moment, breathe, reflect on each step, take notes, and trust the process - it will work! Don’t give up, this first project is one huge milestone for us all on this journey!