Engineering Projects
I enjoy building small tools and experiments that explore technical problems or solve everyday annoyances. Many of these projects start from a simple question: why does this system behave this way?
YouTube Playlist Tracker
As someone who carefully organizes playlists, I found it frustrating when YouTube playlists developed gaps — videos becoming private, deleted, or region-restricted with no way of knowing what disappeared. I built a tool that archives playlists and detects missing videos by combining data from the official YouTube Data API and YouTube’s internal InnerTube API.
Each API exposes different capabilities. The official API works well for private playlists and region restrictions, while InnerTube is required to access system playlists like Watch Later. To keep the system reliable, the project uses a provider abstraction where both APIs implement the same interface while handling authentication differently. This allows the application to automatically select the correct provider depending on the playlist type. The result is a CLI tool that can reliably archive playlists and detect missing videos across multiple playlist types.
- combining two APIs with different capabilities
- designing a clean provider abstraction
- avoiding false negatives when playlists behave differently
- building the tool as a CLI utility for automation