Return values are extremely important, and I was reminded of this after banging my head against the wall trying to pass the last test of a Sinatra app lab. I mistakenly took the .find and .find_by methods at face value and assumed that the difference between them was insignificant. However, I learned that these two methods can produce very different results.
As I sat down to start my first project, I felt a healthy combination of pride in how much I learned in only three weeks and uneasiness as I stared wide-eyed at my blank text editor. I was tasked with creating a CLI that scrapes data from an existing webpage and demonstrates all of the principles I learned about Object Oriented Programming. I thought to myself, “Whoa. Where do I even begin?”
On my third day of Flatiron School’s Online Software Engineering program, I was working on a regex lab at a table in WeWork when a group of four guys walked up behind me to go to the espresso machine. Under normal circumstances, you would think that this would be an uneventful encounter, but fortunately, they gifted me with great material for my first blog post.