What Building My First Video Tool Really Taught Me
This series started with one annoyed person cutting movie clips by hand, and it ends with a small workshop of tools: a…
Desktop Apps
The story of my first software project, a Python and FFmpeg toolkit I built to cut, join, caption, and compose movie clips for recap videos, told step by step by a self taught maker, including the mistakes.
Moving My Video Tool Into the Browser With FFmpeg and WebAssembly
A desktop tool has a wall around it: installation. To use mine you needed Python, FFmpeg on the PATH, and my script,…
When My Tool Got Too Slow, I Tried Learning Rust
My toolkit worked, and it was slow. Not broken slow, just heavy enough that every run broke my flow, and most of…
The Word Automatically Was Hiding Three Hard Problems
The plan sounded easy when I said it out loud. The tool joins the clips, then adds captions automatically. One sentence. But…
Composing the Final Video, and a Preview That Saved Me
The two tools I had built, one to break a movie into clips and one to join clips together, were really steps…
Building a Second Tool to Join Clips Into Finished Videos
By now I had a tool that could pull clips out of any movie. But that was only half of what I…
Making a Tkinter App Fit Any Screen With a Scrollable Layout
Every time a tool grows, the same thing happens. The screen fills up. I had added new modes and new output types,…
Adding Interval and Screenshot Modes by Reusing What I Had
By this point my tool did one thing well. It found scene changes and cut clips from them. But the more I…
The Python Bug With No Error Message That Cost Me Days
I finished adding a feature to my video tool, ran it, and something was wrong. Not wrong in the way that gives…
The Small Feature That Got Complicated the Moment I Allowed Combinations
Once my tool could find scenes quickly, I added what felt like a tiny feature. Instead of always cutting from the middle…