For my first portfolio project, I built a CLI that pulls movie data from a Lord of the Rings API. We had the option of simply scraping data from a traditional Web site, but I wanted the extra challenge. I had also never worked with API keys before. Learning how different APIs accept keys was how I spent the majority of my time on this project. It was stressful at times, but I learned a lot.
One of the other main challenges was having to skip over movies from The Hobbit franchise in my iterators, and the fact that the Lord of the Rings movies were actually out of order in the raw JSON data. This was nothing a couple of dedicated parsing methods couldn’t fix. It’s fun to manipulate data and arrange it aesthetically. Having a background in art and design, I compare the experience to making a collage out of newspaper clippings. Doing the work and having a final product that looks just right is so satisfying.
It’s a simple program, but it does what I want and presents the data in a nice and neat manner.