Why you should build your own Pokédex.
Hey folks, I hope you are doing great!
Why am I writing a story about Pokémon? Hahahah. The short answer is:
Everybody loves Pokémon. And if you don’t like it, you’re not a good person. Joking! :)
The long answer is: I always found difficult to motivate myself to study new topics in programming. What I discovered is that it’s much easier to study something if you are having fun along the way. And that was exactly what I had while building my own Pokédex: I was having fun while building it!
So my main objective with this short article is to tell you:
If you are finding it difficult to keep yourself motivated to study, my suggestion to you is — Try to find something that you really like and think about a small application that you can build with that theme.
For me, Pokémon was the perfect theme choice and maybe it is a good theme to you too!
Before we talk about some of the resources you can use to build your own Pokédex, I will leave my own implementation so maybe you can inspire yourself :)
You can check my Angular Pokédex here. And the source code here.
So, what are the resources that you can use in order to build your own Pokédex?
- PokeAPI — This a web site that has a great documentation about all the endpoints available to you so you can “catch” your Pokémon information. And the most important part: it is FREE! :)
- Figma — is an excellent source of resources to get design ideas for your applications. There is a lot of free templates available to use. You can check some of the Pokédex designs here.
Basically these were the two main resources that I used to build my Pokédex, alongside with the Angular framework.
I chose to use Angular because it is the framework that I’m currently studying, but you can choose whatever framework/language you want.
To conclude this story, before you start your PokéCoding adventure, I highly recommend the reading on this article — How to think like a programmer — by Richard Reis.
In summary, the article above gives you a nice framework to solve problems which is defined in three simple steps:
- Understand the problem.
- Plan your solution.
- Divide — break a problem into a smaller one.
I strongly recommend that you follow these steps before starting to code your application. A good tool to use in order to plan your solution is a flow chart. You can see an example of a Pokédex flow chart here.
When I started to apply these concepts into my daily routine I realised how helpful they are to organize your thoughts before starting some new task.
I hope they can help you as well :)
Nice coding!!
