Okay, so I was messing around with some data, and I got curious about holidays in Nicaragua. I figured, why not try to pull this info together myself? Here’s how it went down.
Digging In
First, I needed a place to start. I mean, I could’ve just googled “Nicaragua holidays,” but where’s the fun in that? I wanted to build something. So, I thought about what I needed:
- A reliable source of holiday data.
- A way to grab that data.
- Some way to make it usable.
I’ve played around with APIs before, so that seemed like a good route. I did a bit of searching and found a few options, I ended up trying one that looked promising.
Getting My Hands Dirty
The API I used had some documentation – thank goodness. It wasn’t the best documentation I’ve ever seen, but it was enough to get me going.
I grabbed my trusty code editor,I started writing some simple code to make a request to the API. The basic idea was to ask for the holidays in a specific year, for Nicaragua.
After that, I got a bunch of data back. It was messy, a big blob of text. So, I had to figure out how to pick out the bits I wanted.
Making Sense of It All
The data was structured. It had things like “date,” “name,” and “localName” for each holiday. “localName” was interesting – it gave the holiday name in Spanish!
I tweaked my code to loop through all the holidays in the response and print out the date and the name, and the local name too, just for kicks.
Here is the sample of result I got:
2024-01-01: New Year’s Day (Año Nuevo)
2024-03-28: Maundy Thursday (Jueves Santo)
2024-03-29: Good Friday (Viernes Santo)
And so on…I felt pretty good! I had taken some raw data and turned it into something readable, something I could actually understand. It wasn’t perfect, I am sure there are tons of ways to improve it. But it got me something to look at. That is pretty cool I think.
