I was pretty excited when I heard what our project was going to be. We had only been learning for a few short weeks now and there were definitely some hurdles to jump when it came to learning certain concepts. But the most important piece of information (I believe) that we were given was to find a topic that you cared about. That made all of the difference.
While we were being taken through what our project should look like, we were guided through a site that hosts free API’s that data could be pulled from. One in particular caught my eye: Pokemon Go. This game died down for a lot of people, but for my family here in Florida, we don’t go anywhere without our bands that do a lot of the work for us. Everyone plays and that is actually sometimes difficult because my parents aren’t familiar with the series and don’t have a ton of experience with some of the game’s mechanics. So now I had a project and a purpose.
Before in our labs, a lot of tests were built on accomplishing very similar tasks to what my app ended up doing, but the main difference with my personal project was that I knew exactly what data I needed and how I wanted it to function. Knowing what I wanted it to do and actually getting it to behave were two different things however. But normally where I would have been frustrated and scouring the internet for a solution that explained things that would finally make sense to me, I was a lot more driven to seek out answers and ideas to support my own. Because of that, I generally solved things much quicker.
Simply grabbing and manipulating the data was likely the more difficult part of the assignment. Once I finally had it though, I only had fun working through the app. It was such a joy to see exactly what I wanted being printed to the screen and so much more rewarding because I was finally starting to feel confident and capable. I owe a lot of that to the group that I’ve been working through the cohort with, but this project really opened people up and got creativity flowing.
The biggest takeaway from this whole thing is that passion drives performance and I’ve seen some really cool things being done by some pretty amazing people. So even though my simple app only spits back some small pieces of data in a few different ways, this is definitely the springboard to an even more exciting future.