This repository (Weather-Dashboard) is an educational homework assignment from the CARL-OTT-FSF-PT-02-20121-U-C course. It was designed to help students become mor familiar with using Application Program Interfaces (API). There are components of using JSON to parse the information from the API to be a usable source of information. As a full stack web developer, its the developer’s responsibility to request the information from an API and the method used is usually fetch. The fetch method requests information from third party API'S and displays the information requested in the front-end website. Allowing students to understand how the information is formatted and how to deal with error's and how to dead that information.
This assignment seemed to be the most difficult to date. I have been working hard to learn all the new material since I have never coded anything, ever before. All my hard work had caught up with me and it was as if I had forgot everything I learned to date. I guess the fatigue had set in and I could not learn anything new and forgot everything. I was pushing to learn everything because the project was coming up and had others to help as well. This did not happen. Luckily, I was able to get my part done for the assignment and help others out in the many zoom meetings we had. I guess I was just expecting to much, that I should somehow be able to do it all by now. That I could make the website and pull the API'S all by myself. I mean I am close and really have a good grasp on the harder stuff in the back end. However, the easy stuff does not come easily to me like it should. I still have a hard time with moving stuff on the site and using div.’s properly. How is that possible, that stuff is the easiest part. I get it when someone shows it to me and when I use the div tool that shows each div on the site and where it’s located on the HTML. However, to create it from scratch for myself I get lost. I try and follow the bootstrap method, container, row, column. The first one works out, but somehow the rest of the div sections do not want to follow suit.
The fatigue of teaching this to myself and not really taking any breaks from it and stresses of everyday life cause up with me this week. So, I see why we have 2 weeks to do the assignment. One week to try and get the work done and the next to try and relax and finish up the work. I do appreciate my group and it helped with the load of the project. Our group worked well together and there was a nice blend of strengths and weaknesses. Where one lacked the other picked up the slack.
This brings us to my next hurdle of this project. On the Friday before the assignment was due, I was just about done and was doing the finishing touches to the assignment, when the API decided to throw me a 401 bad fetch code. I looked up the error code and it said that I was in error with my request. I checked over the request and there were no errors in the html, and I know I had not made any changes to the html. So, I investigated the error code further and found it could be an authentication problem. So, I decided to create a new account on the open weather API and see if I needed a new key because I had maxed out my requests. This changed nothing, I was still getting error code. So, I investigated the weather API a little further and found that neither account was allowing access to the API. Both subscriptions were saying my requests were unavailable as you can see in the pictures below. This led me to doing some more research and finding out there is another type of request I can make, and it’s called a one call. I will be looking into that this week coming up. I wanted to wait and see if this is a server side issue over the holidays as I never received any emails from the API stating that I have exceeded my request limit and the site doesn’t say restricted, just that its unavailable and it will save me some headaches with debugging errors.
It turns out there was an error on my end. The reason I did not think it was me was because I had not made any changes to the fetch and it was showing a bad fetch. I decided to look into it a bit further. I found that there was an extra letter placed in the id on the html and that created the bad search result. I was able to finish the assignment after that. I was kicked out of the API for having to many requests in a minute. I did have to create a new API key.
I did have a lot of help from my Tutor Joey and some from teacher assistants.