Last couple of days were some of the most fun I've had programming. A friend of mine recently got an internship after his masters in Digital Marketing and he caught an interest in data analysis and website scrapers. So he started learning Selenium and asked me for help.
I bet that, to a more experienced coder, figuring out and integrating Selenium's webdriver basic functionalities would take no time at all; but it was a challenge to us. But luckily we were going through it together, and each time we'd find something in the documentation that was cool that we could use, we'd rush to tell the other and try it out.
Lots of errors and breakpoints later, we got it to work! The script goes through a restaurants reviews, changes pages, exports to a .csv. And the best part is, it can be made better in so many ways.
The secret to this really was cooperation. Brainstorming, going through ideas, putting them to pseudo-code, getting errors and figuring out what tools Selenium had in place to prevent those errors, etc. It all came together much more easily because there were two of us, and importantly, because we were at the same skill level.
Sometimes it's easy to think "I can't do this, it's too complicated" but all you need is a fresh set of eyes to give you a different point of view!
Top comments (1)
This is a really important point to remember! My natural tendency is to try and do things on my own. In the past few weeks of being part of a programming bootcamp, I'm truly appreciating the importance of finding a community or friend to bounce ideas off of. Thanks for sharing your insights!