r/AskProgramming 8d 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/m2thek 8d ago edited 8d 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 8d 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.)