What issues are important to you? The American Voter?
The 24 hour news cycle and “fake news” claims everywhere have made it increasingly difficult to gather reliable information on which to base our decision for whom we feel should be the next President of the United States.
The idea for my first software engineering project came to me while discussing politics at work (don’t try this at home folks). I realized that I knew far less about the candidates than I’d like to. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have a lot of spare time to dissect websites that may be full of biased political jargon, nor do we wish to waste precious time watching heated discussions on news programs that leave us as confused as we were when we sat down.
I decided to create Vote the Issues, an application that would allow the user to pick a candidate, pick an issue, and see their viewpoint; OR, to pick an issue and see how all the candidates’ viewpoints compare. I thought that finding a website to gather the information from would be the hardest part.
10.times do
``puts "HA! HA! HA!"``
end
I quickly learned that many of the features I hoped to include in my CLI gem would have to wait, due to my current knowledge level and/or time constraints. Once I mapped out the simplest version of Vote the Issues that satisfied the project requirements and myself, I felt pretty good about my ability to get it working. There were challenges along the way, but none that I wasn’t equipped to take on thanks to the Flatiron web development curriculum and available support.
At this point in time, there are features that I would like to add and revisions that I hope to make, but I am proud of what I have accomplished thus far! Someday, I hope that Vote the Issues becomes a tool the American voters can rely on to help them select the candidate that best represents them based on their views, regardless of political party.
Check it out here: https://github.com/ortufte/vote_the_issues