At first, when I opened up the page for this project, I felt overwhelmed. I started wondering, “Am I sure I’m cut out to be a programmer? This is going to be a hard project.” After reading everything, I did some brainstorming by myself and with my husband to try to figure out what I wanted to do. This is an important part of the process because you should be scraping a website or websites with some kind of topic that you’re interested in and not something you think is boring. Though my husband knows a lot of things that I like and my hobbies, he doesn’t understand some of the programming aspects to be able to know if something would really work. I ended up picking my favorite hobby, knitting.
I have seen #tap being used by Avi during videos and in the solution to some of the labs and I only somewhat understood what it is really doing. Sometimes I feel that I need more explanation than the Ruby docs can give and I feel like some of the answers on Stack Overflow are over my head or they just give the answer and really don’t explain what the method is doing. So I did some searching and found a couple of websites that were useful. On the See John Code blog, he shows what the code is behind the #tap method:
I have been programming on and off for about 30 years now. I remember using my mom’s Atari back in 1987 to write little programs in BASIC that printed things out on the screen, and I just thought that was the coolest thing in the world! I really enjoyed every time I was able to learn more about programming while I took my college classes for my Associates and Bachelors. In my Master’s program, there wasn’t much about programming (hindsight being 20/20 that should’ve been a clue to me that I needed to be in a different program). After working 20 years in the medical field, I knew I wanted to do something that involved computers, and that was why I took the computer related degrees.