Josh's Proposed Changes

[joshcase]

Please note much of what I'm saying is highly opinionated (in the sense that not everyone will agree - as with medicine, there are many ways to skin a cat).

I recommend reviewing the PR via the commits tab, allowing you to see each of the changes 1 by 1.

General notes:

• great effort, sufficient architechture in place for the small size of the application
• app crashes on run after pulling from repo (small syntax error - fixed)
• They say there are two things that are truly hard in programming: cache invalidation and naming things. It becomes an art to get these right - perhaps we can discuss more later. In one case, "search_term_list" is somewhat redundant - we should know from the type of search_term_list that it's a list. I instead propose "search_terms". Don't include the data type in the name of a varible unless absolutely necessary - this gets confusing.
• The "num_searches" section got a little bit weird. I think the missing piece to the puzzle was realising that if the user gave you a single string for a search term, you could just put it straight inside a list and treat it the same.
• When wanting to use an index in a for loop, I much prefer the "enumerate" pattern. Enumerate takes a list and returns a list of tuples with two values: the index and the list value (see the examples). This allows us to skip weird for i in range(num_searches) expressions.
• The whole "SERIES OF FUNCTIONS TO PARSE KEY INFORMATION ABOUT VIDEOS" section is a very strong indication that you intuitively understand that these functions deserved to be organised somewhere. This is good. When you start to arrange top level functions like this, probably the correct place for these to be stored is inside a class or classes. Think "Video", "Channel", "YouTubeAPIResponse" etc. If you're not comfortable with the class pattern yet, let's discuss this weekend

I do have a few more bits and pieces in terms of general style, but I think that's probably enough for now and I'm dead tired! Great tool though - I wonder what sort of scope there is to hook this up to a script that runs routinely and perhaps notifies you via email or similar about videos in your niche.

Chat soon

[chris-lovejoy]

Great edits - much appreciated