The first time I ever read the acronym “CLI” I had no idea what it meant. Naturally, I turned to the almighty oracle that is Google and I learned that “CLI” meant “command-line interface or “command-line interpreter.” What I got from learning “command-line interface” didn’t really clear anything up either. I mean, I understand what those words all in a row meant but I still didn’t understand how I was going to build this fancy interface thing. Luckily for me, by the time project week came around I’d gotten a lot more practice in reading and creating some pretty cool code. That being said, the project was still daunting.
I was pretty nervous about starting the project but after watching a couple of walkthroughs and choosing a website to build from my nerves turned more into excitement and determination to solve the puzzle of the CLI. Starting was the hardest part but after getting even just the first bits of code working it was enough motivation to try and get everything else working one step at a time as well.
I chose to utilize web scraping for my CLI. It was hard to choose a website but once I had, it was exciting to integrate it into my project. I started by building a CLI with fake data in order to make sure the output the user was receiving actually worked in way the user could interact with, without any super complicated commands. After that it was, not so simply, a matter of getting my code talking with the website and getting the scraper talking with the specific information I wanted to pull from the site. It was definitely a puzzle! It helped that I chose a website I was interested in, aka a site for buying plants that provides you a short care bio to help you understand the needs of that specific living plant.
Getting the code to work was the most satisfying part! Honestly couldn’t believe it when my CLI was full functioning at the end. I kept telling myself there must definitely be something missing or going wrong. However, after running the program dozens of times I finally let the shower of relief take over. I had a seemingly functional CLI! From there all I had to do was clean it up and add some flare to the output. Now that it’s all said and done it doesn’t seem so scary looking back. I’m sure I’ll be just as nervous about the next project but I have some more confidence that everything will turn out OK after finishing up my first command-line interface!