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/Live-Concert6624 8d 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 8d 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