Liberal Arts graduate looking to develop a web app | Hacker News Reader

Liberal Arts graduate looking to develop a web app

3 pointslezzard1 comment

Howdy, I've been lurking Hacker News for a few months and have found it very educational. I only took two programming classes while studying for my English B.A., but have been interested in computers and technology since I was young. I've come up with what I'm picturing as a web app that I want to develop to help ease the pain found in long distance relationships. Without going into too much detail about the application at the moment, I want people to be able to share media privately. At the moment, I want to just develop something so my girlfriend and I can watch videos that she or I upload, but I would like to possibly scale it to a larger audience.

What I'm looking for is any guidance. I've only worked with Python and Java in the past, as well as a bit of HTML, and I am wondering what the best framework would be to use? I'm interested in utilizing HTML5 for the most part, but I'm unsure of how to even begin a project like this.

I'm not a web developer, but hopefully I can point you in the right direction. If you're comfortable with Python, then I can point you to the popular Django[1] web framework. Though really, if you've barely used Python, then it would probably be equally easy to get started with Ruby and Ruby on Rails[2] instead. Like I said, I'm not a web developer, but I know both frameworks have lots of support and information out there, including tutorials. I highly recommend following through with some tutorials first, just to get yourself accustomed to how the platform works.

As far as your actual idea goes, I saw the keyword "privately". Now when you first start out and it is just you and your girlfriend, then privacy is easy if you two are the only ones who can access the site. Presumably other people would also want to make sure that not even you, the site administrator would be able to view their uploaded videos. That is probably going to mean encryption, and the mess that comes with it. Colin Percival has a recent blog post[3] about designing apps and services so that the users don't have to trust the developers.

In the meantime, a quick and dirty solution would be to have a Dropbox account that the two of you share, so when you place a file in the proper directory, it automatically gets synced to the other person. You could even encrypt the videos locally before putting them in the Dropbox folder. (You'll probably have to move them from the Dropbox folder to elsewhere after the sync, or you'd quickly fill up the 2GB limit for free accounts).

[1] https://www.djangoproject.com/ [2] http://rubyonrails.org/ [3] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-19-playing-chicken-w...

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