The first project that I ever successfully developed on my own is called lyricWordCount.py. The program is ran via the command line and asks the user to input an artist and a song. It will then print out the lyrics and the number of times each word occurs with the option to exclude "boring words". It can be found on my github at github.com/GianniBYoung/lyricWordCount

Since high school I have been very into music and enjoy delving into the lyrics and understanding what the artist might be trying to convey to the listener. The website genius was a massive help and I spent many hours interpreting and analyzing lyrics. As mumble rap began to grow in popularity, I began to get annoyed with the sometimes ridiculous amount of repetition in the most popular songs, take gucci gang for example. The words ‘gucci’ and ‘gang’ are both said 52 times according to my program. I began to wonder how many times certain words were said. This was my inspiration for this program.

In attempt to teach myself the python language I had read Introducing Python by Bill Lubanovic and created this program as my first python project. It has many rough edges and looking at it now I can see many improvements that should be made. Coming from a Java and C background there was a lot about python that enticed me but two things that really enthralled me were dictionaries and comprehensions. After lots of trial and error, and misunderstandings of syntax I was able to get my program into a working state and was proud and inspired. This was my first real project that I had wanted to make and was able to. Upon seeing it run and accomplish my goal I saw all sorts of possibilities open up in front of me. I now realized that I might not have all the programming skills in the world yet, but I can actually make something of substance. I felt validated and excited, I had learned so much and began to feel confident in my skills and my ability to persevere and problem solve. The program itself isn’t the most important takeaway from this project but the experience I had creating it.