How to Start a Coding Your Dreams
I decided to try and put the information I learned from Flatiron into practice and start a project alone but found the process harder than initially expected. I did not even know where to start or if the relevant information I was looking for existed; it does, but not how I initially expected! This blog will focus on starting a solo project to prove to you all and myself that creating a solo project is possible. After researching the topic, it seems that there are four major parts to starting a project. They are: finding a topic, finding relevant information, discerning your project’s end goal, and the second set of eyes to review your work. In this blog, I will apply these first steps to a paper that I wrote, which urges people to research the five extinction events of Earth and geologic ice ages as they may be analogs for our future.
The Idea
Five major extinction events punctuate the history of life on Earth. The end-Permian extinction event is thought of as the most dramatic example, taking nearly 95% of all life at the time. [Vijda, Mcloughlin 2005] Only 50 Mya after the end-Permian extinction began the Triassic — Jurassic extinction. This extinction saw the end of 70% of vertebrates and nearly 100% of shallow marine life. Strangely enough, a large number of terrestrial plants were vastly unaffected. During the end-Triassic extinction, close to half of all the life that existed at the time went extinct. These events are consequential to study because they give insight into CO2 change, oxygen levels, climate, and growth. These extinctions have fundamentally changed the planet inside and out. [Kunin, W.E.; Gaston, Kevin, eds. (31 December 1996)] As the least understood of all extinction events, geologists are still unsure about the cause of the Triassic — Jurassic boundary. Potential causes are a change in climate, a meteor impact, or mass volcanic eruptions, similar to that of Permian. What’s for sure is a massive extinction seen in the floral and fauna from the terrestrial and marine environments. During the end-Triassic extinction, a negative excursion of light carbon isotopes was found, meaning that the number of organisms using these carbons considerably decreased. [Stephen P. Hesselbo et al. 2002] The end-Triassic extinction took nearly 100% of the coral reef, and roughly half of all life at the time became extinct [McElwain et al. 2007]. The cause, full scale, and fossil records of either extinction events have not been sifted through and explored. In the past decade, these matters have been investigated for the first time since 1937. Without proper research into these types of cases, it is impossible to track and prepare for another mass extinction event. The lack of research leaves humans ill-prepared to handle the imminent geological conditions we have put into motion. This project aims to look into geologic shifts, meteor impact data, and how these relate to extinction events.
` Relevant Information
As the relevant information on this topic is expansive, this blog will only concern itself with computer science-related data. I began by using the search words “Geological Ice Age API/data.” This leads me to find information on the topic, but it held no academic nor cs related value. In the end, I needed to use the search terms “free API database” as a steep fee was necessary on all of the websites on which I found relevant information. A great resource that I found was ANY-API.com. It was there that I found the API site LottaData. ‘LotaData is an alternative data company that provides “People Intelligence”® for apps, cities, and enterprise businesses. Our machine learning and geo-visualization can tell you why people are where they are and what is on their minds so that you can predict, locate, and engage with mobile users.’ While this was good for current geographical data, I want information about prehistoric data as well. This leads me to a familiar place, Github. GitHub features tons of free-to-use API data regarding anything you can imagine. But did not have the information I needed to start the project. In the end, I had to create an API that had the relevant information I wanted. I will detail the steps in my next blog.
Purpose
A significant issue of our time is climate change, and at this point, humans are incredibly ill-prepared to handle the imminent shifts in our environment. This project aims to educate and prepare people for these changes by looking into geologic shifts, meteor impact data, and how these relate to extinction events.
Since starting to code, I find it easy to lose track of its purpose while writing it. Following this process, I hope you can use the project’s focus to create applications with a UX interface crafted for your target audience. Once I had this information, starting on the project became much more manageable. I was able to grow my initial idea around my purpose and the data that I created. The first version of the final product is finally in the testing phase! I attached a demo of the project below!
