Today marks the day I made my first gem in Ruby. I am very proud of what I have accomplished and would like to share with you!
The gem i created is called Slideshower, which is a CLI gem where it asks you for what types of stock photos you would like to view, and it either displays the whole list of photos related at once, or one by one as a slideshow, depending on your selection.
I gained inspiration to do this by thinking of a big project I want to complete, which is making a magic mirror, or “smart mirror” if you will. One of the appications I want displayed on the magic mirror is a slide show of your personal photos. Finding and scraping the URLs to images will allow me to display the photos on a graphical interface. After gaining some more knowledge on API’s and Access Tokens, I will modify this gem to scrape the users personal photos off of social media sites, giving the magic mirror more of a personal touch.
I decided to scrape photos off of www.pexels.com because it was a great start, and after trying to scrape photos off of facebook, I realized how advanced Facebook’s security is. I found out that I needed to learn a bit more about API’s and Access Tokens, which I will be learning soon.
Another thing I learned while developing this gem is to commit, commit, and commit. Doing so will allow you to track your progress, and prevent yourself from losing valuable code while debugging. I like to think of it like saving a videogame. Getting a game over without saving for an hour or two of progress would be really frustrating.
I learned a lot while creating my first Gem, and I am beginning to see myself more and more as a developer.