Okay, so today I’m gonna walk you through my little experiment with something called “micah shrewsbury.” Honestly, the name sounded cool, and I was looking for a new project to mess around with, so I dove right in.
First things first, I started with a clean slate. I grabbed my usual development environment – VS Code, because I’m basic like that – and created a fresh directory. Gotta keep things organized, you know? I then initialized a new project using npm. That part’s pretty standard: npm init -y. Just blasted through the defaults. Didn’t really care about the specifics at this point.
Then came the tricky part. “micah shrewsbury” wasn’t exactly a well-documented thing. Googling it mostly led to some personal websites and LinkedIn profiles. Not exactly helpful for a coding project. So, I had to dig deeper. After a bit of searching through some obscure forums and GitHub repos, I finally figured out it was related to some kind of data visualization library. Aha! Progress!
I decided to try installing what I thought was the core library. Ran npm install micah-shrewsbury-viz. Fingers crossed. Seemed to work, no errors. Okay, cool. Now, to actually use it. The documentation was, let’s just say, minimalist. Basically non-existent. So I had to reverse engineer things a bit.
I created a simple HTML file and a JavaScript file to start. Linked them up, and then started poking around the library’s code in node_modules. Yeah, I know, not ideal, but desperate times, desperate measures. I saw a few functions that seemed interesting, like createChart and renderData. So I just started throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck.
I created some dummy data – an array of objects with random numbers – and tried feeding it to createChart. Nothing. Well, not nothing. Just a blank screen. Checked the console, no errors. Frustrating. Okay, maybe I needed to specify some options. More digging in the code, and I found a few config parameters. Tried setting those, still nothing. Arg.
I spent a good couple of hours just fiddling with different configurations, trying to get something to show up on the screen. Eventually, I realized I was missing a crucial step: I needed to specify a target element for the chart to be rendered into. Duh. Added a <div id="chart"></div> to my HTML, and then passed #chart as an argument to createChart. Boom! A basic chart appeared. A victory, however small.
From there, it was just a matter of tweaking the options to get the chart looking the way I wanted. I messed around with the colors, the labels, the axes, all that jazz. It was a slow process, mostly trial and error, but I eventually got something that looked decent. Not amazing, but decent.
The key takeaways from this whole experience:
- Don’t be afraid to dive into the source code when the documentation sucks.
- Trial and error is your friend, especially when dealing with undocumented libraries.
- Always double-check that you’re actually rendering the chart to the right element.
All in all, “micah shrewsbury” was a bit of a wild goose chase. The library itself is pretty rudimentary, and the lack of documentation makes it a pain to use. But, hey, I learned something, and that’s what matters, right?
What I ended up with:
It’s a basic bar chart showing some randomly generated data. Nothing fancy, but it proves I got the thing working. If I were to use it for any of my future projects, I would be sure to document my usage and process.
