My First Basic Application

When tasked with building a working application for our phase 1 project, I began to feel overwhelmed. I was no stranger to this feeling as this course is quite difficult. Even just thinking about what my application could be had me deep in thought for days. There were so many options: I could build a weather app, or maybe a recipes app, or perhaps even a GitHub search app. Alas, none of these options stuck with me and I was close to giving up hope because it’s one thing to decide what I want the app to be, but then I have to actually build the app with code.

Finally, I tried to stop attacking the problem so analytically and just started to peruse my interests. Hmm, I love movies…why don’t I make a simple movie app that displays any movie you search? That was a start. I began by creating the framework in HTML. In other words, I was simply building how the app would look on its home page. The title, “Movies” would be at the top left right next to the search bar. I made the styling edits I wanted to make and alas, I was done with the first step.

Now came the hard part: writing the JavaScript code that would provide functionality to the app. I found a public movie API that gave me access to a list of movies, TV shows, actor images, and all the data about the movies. Ultimately, I wanted my movie app to show a list of movie titles and images and also if you search for a movie, it will get the data you requested from the API. So, I went ahead and completed the fetch request in order for this to work. I also wanted the homepage to simply display the 20 most popular movies at the time. I did so by using console.log and therefore logged the data on to the app.

JavaScript continues to be daunting so I requested outside help from a friend with a degree in software engineering and the overall process took the entire week up until the very last day when it was due. I proceeded to add the correct functions, event listeners, etc. to increase the functionality of the app and in the end, I had successfully created a working movie application.