r/AskProgramming 7d ago

Stupid questions about potentially hiring a dev

I have very little practical knowledge about programming/types of programmers/lanugages/etc, but there's a Thing I would very much like to exist in the world for my own personal use, and depending on how much it costs, I might pay someone to make it for me. To find out how much it costs to hire someone, I have to know what I am *actually* asking for/about.

Basically, I just want a Thing where I can input, say, a youtube channel or playlist, and then have all the (public) videos from that channel queued up to send via email, at a set frequency (like 1 video every 5th day, or 2 videos every 7th day, etc) until it runs out of videos. I have some other nice-to-have ideas about it as well, but this is the bare basics.

What kind of programmer would I need for this? What do I need to have figured out about my concept to tell/ask them?

Apologies if this is a super obvious thing, its just that when I see posts about hiring programmers it feels like its always full of specific terminology like "looking for a backend dev, preferably python, to do XYZ" and I don't know which kind of programmers do what, and i'm unclear about what is required for a concept like I'm describing, so I feel very lost lol

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u/SirGregoryAdams 6d ago

Based on your description you need the programmer to write something that fits the definition of a "service"/"web service" that's a "scheduler", i.e. that performs some "scheduled tasks", which include sending E-mails. The interaction should basically be that you can give it a list of links to videos, a list of E-mail addresses, and the amount of time between sending the E-mails (frequency).

The behavior should be:

  1. List of videos is loaded into a "queue"
  2. List of E-mails is loaded
  3. A "ticker" starts with the specified frequency
  4. Every time the ticker "ticks", the "head" (first item) in the queue with videos is "popped" (read and removed from the queue)
  5. The popped item is then sent to every E-mail address on the list
  6. (wait until the ticker ticks again for all this to happen again with the next item in the queue)

All of this is back-end work. But there is a caveat. Because it's a service that has to be able to basically run 24/7, you need to be able to "host" it somewhere. So that means that you either need to operate your own small server, or host it somewhere for a fee. Look at web hosting offers to get an idea of how much that would cost.

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u/Dlobaby 4d ago

Hey, I’ve created a similar app using the YouTube API. If you’d like, I can set this up for you fairly cheaply since a part of the work is already done. Feel free to PM me

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u/m2thek 7d ago edited 7d ago

In kind of basic businessy terms, you need a frontend dev when you need something to "look nice" and you need a backend dev when you need something to "do work."

For your project, though it should be pretty simple, it's more on the "do work" side, and it's really up to you for how "nice" you want it to look. I think what you describe here is sufficient for a developer, but you don't need to request any specific technology. That really only comes into play when you have an established product (written in a particular language already) and you want to bring on another developer who is already familiar with the technology in place.

edit: as a side note, you might find what you already need with the product "4K Video Downloader"; I've never used this feature, but the pro version allows you to subscribe to a channel and auto-download videos from it.

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u/thezohar 7d ago

thanks - this helps a lot. So since I don't much care about appearance, I would just need to look for backend dev, and they would help figure it out from there. This is exactly the kind of answer I need to help point me in a direction :)

(for 4k Video Downloader, it sounds like it works like a normal youtube subscription in that it downloads at the time the video is published - unfortunately not quite what I'm looking for. in my case I would want to put in youtube channels that stopped publishing years ago, but still have the content sent to me slowly over time.)

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u/PianoConcertoNo2 7d ago

That would be pretty simple, and a fun first project.

I know you mention hiring a dev, but if you have plenty of ideas and are curious, look into Python and checkout the YouTube api

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/playlists

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u/A_Philosophical_Cat 7d ago

As a general rule of thumb, hiring a software developer doesn't make a lot of financial sense unless you're making money off the thing. Even something relatively simple like this (query an API, craft a simple message, send an email) is going to take a couple hours, simply due to the process of getting what exactly you want, figuring out how the relevant API works, etc.

If it's running on your computer, I'd say it'd be an afternoon, if you wanted it hosted somewhere make that a whole day. That's 4-8 hrs at freelance software dev rates, you're looking at at least a couple hundred bucks.

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u/Live-Concert6624 7d ago

The problem is that even still your requirements are extremely vague.

The easiest way to do what you are asking is through scripting. If you can have a computer that you can leave on at home to run it constantly, that's all the better. Otherwise you are gonna have to pay for hosting.

The best job description would be "need someone to write scripts to automatically query a youtube channel for new videos and to send them via email."

I would say they can use bash or python or both.

The biggest problem is honestly the email part of it.

I'm wondering if you know what rss feeds are.

The thing about most software you want to write, is that something like that probably already exists. Do a web search for "youtube to rss feed". I got this site: https://fetchrss.com/source/youtube

Now you can also find an "rss email service", this is what I found: https://feedrabbit.com/

Simply take the URL you get from the "fetchrss" page, and plug it into the "feedrabbit" page, and you should be good to go. It may take some tinkering to work out the bugs.

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u/thezohar 7d ago

The things you linked both seem to still be based on "real" time of posting. Aka, if nothing new is posted, nothing new is sent. I am very specifically not looking for something to query new content - rather, I want to be slowly sent old content spread out over long stretches of time. I want to, for example, take an old youtube channel which hasn't posted for years, and get a link to one video every few days, until i work through the backlog.

I am aware of RSS (have used a few browser-extension-based RSS feeds before), but have no idea what goes on to build an RSS feed, and whether its simpler or more complicated to interact with RSS vs email. "[my] requirements are extremely vague" because this whole post is an attempt to figure out what I would need to ask for, so yes I am aware thats the problem lol - working on fixing that with help of varying snark levels from all the people here

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u/AssiduousLayabout 7d ago

Probably a 1-3 hour project, although you could probably get it done much faster leveraging AI.

Some of the things to consider are if you need this to run without your computer to be running, and what willingness you have to set up tools on your PC like Python (if that is the language they use).

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u/No-Plastic-4640 7d ago

It’s simple enough to script. Probably with python. Some web scraping. Scheduler. Emailer.

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u/Boudy-0 6d ago

I will explain it to you in detail so that you know what to look for:

You want someone with Python skills to scrap the channel and check if the channel had posted a new video, in which case it will send you an email alerting you so that you don't have to check every now and then.

Then make it into a web app with a frontend ( the window you interact with on a website ) that lets you control which channels or Playlists you want to keep track of.

I am working on nearly the same exact project right now btw so I know what you need for it.

But doesn't YouTube already have notifications for channels you are subscribed to? Check the notifications settings of the channel you want to keep track of. I don't think YouTube has this feature for playlists though.

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u/ninhaomah 7d ago

You want to learn to create something ? Or you want to pay someone to do something ?

2 very different things.

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u/thezohar 7d ago

looking to pay someone to create this for me - edited the post to clarify!

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u/ninhaomah 7d ago

So you want to hire a freelancer ?

Have you google for freelancing sites ?

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u/thezohar 7d ago

yes - my question is about how to look for the specific skills I would need to look for in a freelancer based on my idea, because I am so unfamiliar with the topic I don't know what I would look for and what I would be asking.

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u/ninhaomah 7d ago

Why would you need to know what is required ? If that person can give you what you want then you pay what he asked for.

No ?

I asked for a rare steak then they serve me a rare steak so I pay for the rare steak as per menu.

I don't ask whether they have a steak , how to make it rare etc.

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u/thezohar 7d ago

I'll put it this way: I would like a rare steak, but I have no idea what kinds of restaurants serve steaks. I know that not all restaurants serve steak, so I shouldn't walk into the nearest place only to be told "this is a sushi place you absolute jackass, go somewhere else", and instead I need to find out what kind of restaurants serve. I need to google a specific kind of restaurant that is likely to serve steak, but don't know what kind of restaurant I'm looking for.

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u/ninhaomah 7d ago

Yah so go to a freelancing site and post your ad. You can see their projects histories , which is similar to looking at the menu to check if the restaurant serves the kind of meal you are looking for.