Project 1 Blog Post
Jordan Tanley 6/23/2022
3rd Blog: Reflection of Project 1
This project required me to learn how to access and pull data from an
API and write functions to translate the data into usable and
customizable data sets. I chose to examine the
Pokemon. I created a function to access
characteristics of 10 different pokemon separately. I then created
another function to basically rbind the individual rows created by the
previous function. This way there’s one row for each pokemon. Then, I
added a new variable, size, based on the weight class. This allowed
for an extra dimension for analysis. Finally, I performed some numerical
and graphical exploratory analyses. There were no exciting discoveries
found in this process, but I’d imagine if I expanded to API accessing
function to create a larger dataset, there might be more interesting
findings.
Honestly, I think the most difficult part of this process was learning how to access the API. I had no experience with APIs prior to our recent homework assignment, which didn’t really give us much more information. Even now, after completing the project, I still don’t feel comfortable that I really know what exactly I did and/or if I did it correctly. I’m sure there was a lot less painful way to accomplish the goals of this project, but with my limited knowledge on accessing APIs, I did the best I could. I think in the future, I’d like to do some deeper research into better ways to access APIs to be better prepared.