CLI Project

This week marked our cohort’s first project as Flatiron School students. To keep things succinct, we were tasked with creating an application that used information from a website. I chose to build an app that would read a ranked list of Nickelodeon shows. The article from Screenrant was listing the top 15 shows Nickelodeon had during the 2000s according to imdb. This was my first time building a repository and setting one up. Setting up the repository took some time and included some growing pains. However, by far the hardest part of building the app proved to be the scraping of the website. In another valuable learning experience, it turned out the html of Screenrant was quite disjointed and made scraping information from the site incredibly hard. Luckily, I am a member of a very talented cohort, and asked my colleague, Kunal, for help in troubleshooting the scraping. We worked for about four to five hours over a period of two days dissecting and pulling the proper html using REGEX. Finally, after encountering hurdle after hurdle, the correct information was able to be scraped.

While the project could have been completed much quicker simply by choosing a website with better organized html, it was a valuable experience in many ways to encounter the difficulty with the website. The most valuable among those being the collaboration that took place to solve the problem.