Syllabus Lesson 104 of 141 · Past the tenth idea
Past the tenth idea

Ban the top ten

Why it matters You cannot ban an idea you have not written down. Writing the obvious ones first gets them out of your head.

The product is a to-do app for small teams. The starter holds the ten likeliest feature ideas for it, each with the words that give it away. First build a checker that spots any of those words in a new idea, then use it on ideas of your own.

avoids_top_ten("A weekly REMINDER email")      # False: "reminder"
avoids_top_ten("A tagline for every list")      # True: "tag" is not a whole word here
avoids_top_ten("Tasks that age visibly")        # True

Some of your ideas will feel worse than the banned ones at first. That is normal: the banned ones had years of polish. Look for the one that solves a problem the top ten ignore.

Recap Write the obvious down, ban it with a checker, then generate. What survives came from somewhere other than the default.

Your turn

Write avoids_top_ten(idea): return False if the idea contains any keyword from TOP_TEN as a whole word or phrase, ignoring case (so "tag" matches "Tag" but not "tagline"), and True otherwise. Then set my_ideas to a list of at least 5 different feature ideas of your own for the same app, each at least 6 words long, that all pass avoids_top_ten.

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