I Was Annoyed With Youtube Playlist So Made My Own

John Zhang
2 min readNov 17, 2020

Like many I use Youtube for entertainment, from music to videos to sometimes movies. There is one feature that I love to use and that is their Playlist feature, the ability to continuously play music either actively watching or just something in the background. However there is the ever dreaded message:

I don’t know how many people hate this as much as I do but it really breaks my vibe when the music stops for essentially no reason. So what’s someone supposed to do about that? Might be a bit drastic but I decided to make my own playlist web app in place of Youtube’s built in app. This is how I made it look:

Utilizing a ruby on rails back-end and reactjs front-end it allows me to create and save personal playlists without requiring the usage of Youtube’s built in playlist function. Because whenever a video ends it freshly loads up another video. Unlike Youtube’s playlists that when they load up another video, they keep track of idle time thus allowing them to time out with the dreaded message.

As an app it was fairly interesting, fun and informative to make. It taught me simple know hows in how to use the Youtube API for a variety of things, such as searching with a query or specific videos themselves. I was also personally grateful for how easy Youtube and by extension Google makes their API so easy to use. It helps also as an avid user of Youtube, I thought of some, if not useful, then at the very least interesting tools to use with my custom playlist app. I do feel creating things that I can use personally teaches the most.

Front-End: https://github.com/jnzhang622/youtube-project-client

Back-End: https://github.com/jnzhang622/youtube-project-server

Demo: https://youtu.be/sSCJfxQ2ZFg

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