LearnTube

I don't know about you but I'm feeling 22 sometimes I get stuck doomscrolling through trash videos on Youtube, hurling me into deep pits of regret.

My Solution

Youtube, but with hella gaurd rails. Like imagine you are Rapunzel and the tower is this app protecting you from the scary cold world of engineered addiction devices (aka short form videos).

• Home Page -> lets you search but only within Education, News, and Science and Tech
• Shorts Page -> similar idea (filters on language and one of the above categories, and streams within that)
• also added a bonus feature to the shorts page that lets you filter by a certain channel (because sometimes I want to scroll through Economist Videos instead of actually using my brain and reading the news)

Try it Out

It's hosted on expo so if you download expo on your mobile device (ios or android), and follow this link, you can try the app on your phone

For the Nerds

• If you wanna know how stuff works, check out the repo, the readme is pretty good (thanks llms)

Demo

Suprises... (some may call these bugs)

Just as I was about to screenrecord the app working at midnight, I hit my daily quota of youtube api requests so f me. If I remember I'll post a video when the quota resets tomorrow.

More broadly, this also made me realize that I need to make way less requests. Super basic caching might be the laziest fix (we are pulling much more than we need to - especially for shorts, for some reason the maxLimit didn't change the response size and we were getting order 10,000 responses back for shorts refresh iirc. i know, very silly). Did not have time to debug buuuuttt my good ol' pal Mr.llm wrote annd pushed a very nice feature request to the repo (which looked semi reasonable when I quickly skimmed it), so hopefully future me or you can fix it ~one day~

Notes to Self (if you're not me, don't read, I'm shy)

seriously?! I bet you're the kind of person who would read a strangers diary tsk tsk

• Publishing takes time. Mainly because that's when all the bugs seem to pop up. So I think I need to really limit the amount of time I can spend developing (one hour (???))
• Will play around... Hopefully I get some sleep over the next thirty days