A CLI project for Seinfeld’s fans
I first learned about Seinfeld 15 years ago from a boyfriend who had the series’ entire DVD collection. He said, “Come on, let’s watch it!”. But I said no, I wasn’t interested in it. A few months later someone stole his collection, leaving him devastated and I would forget about it for the next 7 years.
After all those years, I met my now-husband, an American, the biggest Seinfeld’s fan. Living together, it became impossible not to watch the series with him every-single-night. Yes, every day for the last 8 years! As you can imagine: I became a fan as well.
I started studying Coding this year and when the time arrived to build my first CLI project, I looked for a Seinfeld’s API and I found it! An API with famous quotes by all the characters from the show. This would be perfect, I thought. I could build an app that my husband could use. He likes to play jokes using the show’s quotes with his friends anyway.
The Seinfeld’s Quotes app is designed to guide the fan into a smooth experience and provoke lots of laughs. The process begins when the user has to choose which character’s quotes to see. Then, after seeing its quotes, you have the option to go back and choose another character. When you are ready to exit the app, you receive a goodbye message saying “That’s a shame! No soup for you!”.
I had many difficulties during this process. The first one being that I got COVID and started having symptoms (headaches, body ache, and fatigue) just a couple of days before Project Week and this made me start later than everybody else and not being around during the office hours when I could have gotten some help. Other than that, I had issues with pieces of my code. I wasn’t understanding how to pull the data from the API. My code was looking good, but the data was not showing. After hours of thinking and watching tutorials, I realized that my error was a simple <.self> in front of my method name in my api.rb file. Ok, API working, end of problems. Right? Nope. Then I started having issues using the find_by method. My instructor came along to help me but, after that, I had to start my program over and lost track of how to make it function. I am still trying to figure out how to make it work.
I have learned a lot from this experience. Especially on how to use methods, how to manipulate the API’s data, how to break lines in a block of code, how to use “.colorize” to put some color in the program and turn the user’s experience into a good one. The most important being how “pry” helps when we are stuck.
I hope that Seinfeld’s Quotes will evolve into a useful guide for those fans of the show. Personally, I know my husband and his friends will love it. After all, I am a strong believer that “Laughter Is the Best Medicine”.