Their services are incredibly practical, secure, and let me iterate fast. Less ops overhead, more coding 👍 What are your favorite infra hacks for early projects?
#buildinpublic #buildinginpublic

Why this Cloudflare-heavy approach? My focus is on delivering the app's value, not getting bogged down in complex infra, especially at this early stage. Pragmatism wins.

Handling incoming email (a feature I'm tinkering with for different input methods) is also offloaded. I'm using Cloudflare Email Workers: incoming emails trigger a small #JavaScript function (lambda style!) directly on their edge. Keeps the main bot lightweight.

So, for now, Social Archivist lives on a computer humming away in my home lab! 💻 To make the web server accessible securely without exposing my home IP, I'm using a Cloudflare #ZeroTrust Tunnel. Dead simple setup, surprisingly robust.

3️⃣ The Web Server: A simple Flask application, its main job is fetching processed videos, thumbnails & transcripts from MySQL and presenting them to the user. This keeps the frontend display separate from the backend processing.
#buildinpublic #socialarchivist

2️⃣ The Video Processor (The Workhorse): This is a separate Python service constantly polling the MySQL queue. When it finds a new job ('pending' status), it grabs it and starts the heavy lifting (downloading, converting, AI magic ✨, etc. - more on this soon!)

1️⃣ The Telegram Bot: This is the user-facing part. Built with python-telegram-bot, it listens for messages. When it receives a valid media link (such as a IG reel), it simply adds the job to a queue in a MySQL database. Minimal logic here!

It's SUPER basic right now! No auth, no search, no pagination. Just the core loop for IG Reels works. Think "duct tape and prayers" stage 🙏. But hey, it's a start!

The bot downloads the video, uses AI to transcribe it, and saves it. You can then see your archived content + transcriptions on a simple web interface at socialarchivist.online

My main goal is to learn in the open, connect with you all, and hopefully build something (kind of) useful. Follow along to see how it goes!
#programming #buildinpublic #socialarchivist

I'll be sharing the whole journey – the ideas, tech stack choices, the inevitable challenges and roadblocks, and definitely some mistakes along the way. Aiming for full transparency.

The project? A Telegram bot to grab social media gems (think memes, cool videos/reels), automatically transcribe them using AI 🤖, and make them fully searchable. No more endlessly scrolling to find that one post you saw... somewhere?