Continuing with video contents and getting started with the frontend

With some basic course and lecture end-points created and tested, the next step is the actual video contents of the course along with other downloadable resources like .pdf, .docx, .zip and other files. Since the backend is also now around 1/4th done, it is time to slowly get started with the frontend as well. Rather than start with the frontend for the app directly, I am starting with the video player.

Instead of using the regular video player, I have decided to build a custom video player for a few reasons. First, and quite obviously, I would like to have more control over the videos rather than what comes with a default video player. Second, a year or so back, I was working on another interesting project with a friend that involved building an interactive video player. This was a video player that would take user inputs and play certain parts of the video accordingly. The application for this is primarily in advertising and marketing as the user can choose to watch only what they are interested in watching. With respect to online courses, I would like to use this interactivity in asking students if they would like to review certain concepts necessary for the particular lecture they are about to watch. This is due to the fact that not all students can invest time regularly, and if they are watching videos after several days, they might need a refresher.

This project was called the Accordion player, a name that my friend came up with. I have started hosting this project at this Github link:

https://github.com/shivkiyer/accordion-player

I would definitely like to build the app in React, and would like to also use Angular as it is something I have used in the past. So, there are currently two sub-projects in this repo - one with React and the other with Angular.

Since the app is in the nascent stage, another thing which I would like to go back and work on is documentation. This time, with the Django backend, I have done my best to make the code as modular as possible. This implies classes and functions that are as small as possible. This has the advantage that the single doc string at the beginning of the function or class is usually good enough and there doesn't have to be comments all over the code which can become a little bothersome.

However, with both Python and JavaScript, it might be worthwhile to write proper doc strings which can then be used to create nice understandable documentation of the code. So there might be a few commits only related to documentation over the next week.