Building Youtuber
Something That I Wanted
I’ve read “Automating the boring stuff” at least 2 times now. It may well have been one of the first couple of programming books that I read. Undoubtedly an excellent read (if getting a bit dated now). However, there was no examples in the book that would be a problem that I wanted solved. It seems to be preached quite often in programming circles, myself being guilty of this, that all coding is just glorified “problem solving”. So I sat idle. For a long time, keeping an eye out for something profound that I may want to get my hands on.
Whilst working full time, I got the itch to do something that was more “modern” and exciting compared to the tools that I was using at work. So i started hunting for OSS projects to work on. Graphite, Zed, Blender. All tools that I looked at in an attempt to find something to do. I joined the forums. Voiced my declarations to help. Read through docs, cloned repositories, thinking that maybe something in these communities that I’ve joined will call me to improve myself and perhaps the world too.
I was in it for the wrong reasons. People don’t start contributing to OSS because they want to.1 They do it because there exists a problem that they want solved, and there isn’t a solution. Here I was being a pansy and trying to stroke my own ego by ‘giving back to the community’ but, had I asked anything from it in the first place?
Making My Own Problems
Your mind dulls. Each day that you come home, you see two apparitions; versions of yourself. Always two distinct choices. Good and Bad. Simple and Hard. Fun and… Fun? Social media has been a big part of my existence. Having grown up in the time just before it. I recall a time before it, yet can’t imagine life without it. I’ve been entrances in its sirens song, and I’ve survived to come out the other side with firmer determinations. It’s never stopped ringing in my ears however. There’s always something pulling me back.
YouTube, was always the hardest thing to get rid of. “I might need it!”, “It’s educational”. The common arguments that would keep me from blocking it as I had done with other applications. Scarcely though, was I ever able to put in limitations that would actually stop me. Blockers were far to constricting. You have to watch a “Golang in 100 seconds” every now and then after all. However, applications that would trim functionality from the website were always too easy to circumnavigate. I could never beat my basest wants.
I went looking for solutions that would force me to mindfully search for what I wanted to watch, and for the first time, I found nothing.
There was genuinely nothing on the entire internet that did what I wanted, in the way that I wanted.
Ohhhhhhh buddy. We are in business.
Ratatui
Orhun Parmaksiz is the guy who built Ratatui. I remember watching his stream. He was showing off a 3d terminal. One where your cursor was a rotating rat. Clicking through his videos I stumbled upon one of his talks where was discussing the progress of the Ratatui project. How far it had come in the year since he had made it. And whist he obviously talked about how the project had changed computing. He started to talk about how the project had changed him. How working on this thing that he loves, led him to start looking at his life for the better. He was talking about how this project made him start to work out, and reconnect with this new community. I read through his blog too. Particularity liking how he approached his own work. Here was another person that i’ve never met, who inspires me to be a better version of myself.
This whole thing has been an aside to tell you that I ended up building an application with Rust and Ratatui.
So here I have it: 
Youtuber
A small thing. An app that only does what I want it to do. Nothing more. My first OSS application. Perhaps a small feat compared to spectacular things that others manage to publish on the web. This one is my own.
Funnily enough. Now that I have it. I have no want to make public my creation.2 I use it daily, it scratches my own itch. For the first time, I finally understand what everyone means by that phrase. All it took was for me to invent my own problem.