Beginner dev looks at how YouTube sends videos

[pocketarc]

The end of the post talks about hiring him, and honestly, if anyone’s hiring, here’s one heck of a bargain: Someone who’s just starting out but who’s already shown he’s perfectly capable of figuring stuff out by himself.

[pw6hv]

If I was a hiring manager, I would certainly appreciate this attitude. However, I would value as well a person who would use an already made tool for doing the job (such as yt-dlp). Only problem is that the second type wouldn't write a blog post about it and get traction on HN :D

[darylteo]

Definitely shows good intuition. Even if not doing the actual figuring out, still finds a possible solution and reverse engineers it. Forget 10x developer, this is the 10% of developers.

Open to any ideas how this level of intuition can be imparted at scale...

[cebert]

To most employers it’s more that he can pass two Leetcode mediums and one Leetcode hard in tight time constraints. Just to make sure he’s good, make him do multiple rounds. The Leetcode grinder is quite representative of what software engineering is like in the real world.

[otteromkram]

Looks like they graduated college.

>Oh... that's ALOT of parameters

If they would just learn that "a lot" is two words.

Given that their resume says Coding Ninjas tutor and Coding Ninjas is one of the worst websites out there for coding challenges and tutorials, while using incorrect syntax for Python and C++ (probably to lazily port problems from one language to another), this makes sense.

I'll probably get downvoted for my comment because of all the "touchy feelys" around here, but a lot of people can do what OP did sans college. What makes them extra hireable? Because they had a hacker news story catch some action on a holiday weekend?

[poiuyt098]

idk, hard to believe that with spellcheckers being built into every text editor, the post is riddled with errors. Very sloppy or almost intentional.

[sam1r]

>>> I quickly threw together an ugly frontend and posted it to digital ocean under an express server and prepped another project to repair my broken discord bot.

That is quite some versatile lingo for a beginner dev.

[coolandsmartrr]

The original post doesn't mention "beginner", so I'm not sure why OP (link poster) decided to editorialize it as such.

[throwaway19dmfa]

To be fair there are a lot of people who are familiar with tech stuff and have just never actually learnt any sort of "dev" properly before who I would consider as beginner.

These people also tend up pick things up very quickly at the beginning and are able to use the right lingo after a few months of learning -- anyone who has done a few months of a bootcamp can talk/write like that even if they don't have a deep understanding of what they are talking about.

[akaBruce]

The author mentions

> After all I’ve been a full stack dev for a little bit (just graduated college!)

I'm guessing they differentiate being a dev (professionally or looking for work) from a student perhaps?

[cammikebrown]

I don’t know how to program but I know what all of that stuff means

[VoodooJuJu]

Has the bar lowered? Because I'd consider this lingo pretty accessible and 101 for a beginner anno domini 2024.

[NiekvdMaas]

Nice write-up! For a better maintainable version, I would recommend `yt-dlp --dump-json` instead. This will give you hundreds of other supported sites for free.

[vsgherzi]

Super early on in my carrier. Just wanted to download an mp3 from my favorite artist without weird ads or tracking

[SushiHippie]

I'd recommend you to have a look at yt-dlp [0] and NewPipe extractor [1]

[0] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp [1] https://teamnewpipe.github.io/documentation/

[ramesh31]

You got the knack, bud, and that's all it takes. Plenty of people have finished CS degrees without acquiring the knack. But that's really all it takes. If you've got it, it's just a matter of time before you're knocking people's socks off.

[np1810]

Well written article... nitpick - your article date [1] as of posting this comment is DEC 31 2024...

> fullstack dev versus youtube - DEC 31 2024

[1] https://vincentsg.dev/blog/

[geraldhh]

sure thing, who doesn't

[arcza]

Thanks for posting and well done. Small suggestion for your writing style: use less ALL CAPS / BOOM! / WOW! styles and embrace less dramatic wording: it would make your site read more professionally and be easier to digest. Good luck.

[sevagh]

Their tone reflects their excitement, it's authentic and great.

[243423443]

I enjoyed the writing style.

[withinboredom]

It’s a blog, not a research paper.

[account-5]

This is cool. I wish I could do this sort of thing, however when I come up again something like this I assume it's already been done and go look for the solution. In this case I'd likely have just used yt-dlp. However, had that project been dmca'd, by disreputable organisatios I'd likely have remained stuck, so kudos.

[mcny]

I tried a YouTube shorts video I saw yesterday that for some reason failed to download with yt dlp (also tried with newpipe) to see if this would behave differently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQgKhZZyBYg

Something is squirly with this YouTube video. Can someone else give it a try?

[phantomathkg]

try remove the url and just `yt-dlp JQgKhZZyBYg`

[qingcharles]

Huh, also failed with YouTube Downloader latest version. It got the thumbnail and the list of streams but couldn't download it. WTF?

[ramesh31]

This rules. Pull back the curtain and vanquish the black magic. We should all know how this stuff works, if only to protect ourselves.

[thecleaner]

Now that is how you spend new year. Also beginner dev ? Dont be so modest mate.

[arwineap]

There is basically nothing a beginner could learn with that is completely novel.

We can probably assume this gentlemen already knew about yt-dl and it's derivatives; that wasn't the point of the exercise.

[orenlindsey]

Here's my favorite site for downloading YouTube videos. https://github.com/micahlt/vesper

It's made by a friend of mine, I thought he had a writeup about it, but I can't find it.

[xwowsersx]

What does the author mean that he "created a fetch request in node using the android example"? He means he made the request using Node and impersonated an Android client?

[chupapimunyenyo]

Yes

[remram]

Is "fullstack developer" just "web developer"?

[swyx]

i picked a random video and noticed that the audio (mp3) download was the same filesize as the video (mp4) download. this seems wrong. some thing to do in the encoding?

[justinclift]

Maybe it's sending the same bitstream for both?

[katella]

Is there a way to do this clientside?

[Daneel_]

yt-dlp is the project you want

[tintedfireglass]

uhh the blog is wrongly dated 31st Dec 2024 instead of 2023.