8. Curated Video Discovery Web Platform
Overview
Conceived, built, and launched an independent, full-stack video curation platform engineered to help software engineers, designers, and students discover high-value technical lectures and educational productions without algorithmic recommendation distractions. Developed automated ingestion pipelines interfacing with YouTube and Vimeo public developer APIs to crawl, validate, and enrich video metadata in a high-performance MongoDB store. Created an algorithmic popularity engine that evaluated upvote momentum, watch completion velocity, and community commentary to compute dynamic daily leaderboards. Engineered a responsive single-page web client leveraging modern JavaScript and CSS, incorporating keyboard-driven navigation, embedded media playback, and social curation tools. Deployed the platform with Redis caching layers to withstand traffic spikes, culminating in a successful public launch on Product Hunt where the application earned a featured showcase and attracted thousands of active daily visitors.
Challenge
Engineers, designers, and researchers struggled to discover high-signal technical conferences, design breakdowns, and coding masterclasses amidst algorithmic video feed clutter, clickbait titles, and entertainment recommendations.
Approach
- Built an automated ingestion pipeline in Node.js integrating YouTube and Vimeo developer APIs to harvest high-definition technical content and captions.
- Designed a community ranking algorithm factoring upvote velocity, watch duration signals, and topic tags into real-time leaderboard positions.
- Engineered a responsive single-page web interface with custom HTML5 video controls, keyboard shortcuts, and bookmarking queues.
- Optimized data retrieval with Redis caching and deployed the application on scalable cloud infrastructure with automated SSL and CDN caching.
Outcome
Successfully launched on Product Hunt, achieving featured ranking on launch day and attracting over 15,000 active monthly learners with high engagement retention.