There comes a point in every developer's life when they realize something.
The problem isn't that there's too much to learn.
The problem is that every tutorial starts like this:
"Hey guys... before we begin..."
Five minutes later, they're still explaining what they're about to explain.
I had a mountain of videos to get through.
Training videos.
Tutorials.
Recorded meetings.
The kind of content where every sentence is separated by a thoughtful...
...three-second pause.
I genuinely tried watching them.
I lasted about twelve minutes.
The obvious solution was to watch them at 2× speed.
Except not every website lets you.
Some cap the playback speed.
Some don't even have the option.
Apparently, everyone assumed I wanted to experience every dramatic pause exactly as the creator intended.
I did not.
A normal person would've sighed and moved on.
Maybe looked for an existing extension.
Instead, I had a different idea.
"How hard can it be to write one?"
Those are, of course, the famous last words of every developer.
A few hours later, I had a working Chrome extension.
It found the video on the page, let me control its playback speed, and ignored whatever arbitrary limits the website had decided were "reasonable."
No more hunting through menus.
No more settling for whatever speeds the website offered.
Just glorious accelerated knowledge.
Did I save time?
Eventually.
Did I spend far longer building the extension than I would've saved on those original videos?
Absolutely.
But developers don't optimize for the next hour.
We optimize for every hour after that.
Or at least that's what we tell ourselves.
The funniest part?
I don't even remember what those original videos were about.
Whatever they were trying to teach me has long since faded from memory.
The extension, however, is still around.
The thing I built to avoid watching the videos has outlived the videos themselves.
Looking back, I probably could've just accepted watching everything at normal speed.
But where's the fun in that?
Sometimes software isn't built because the world desperately needs it.
Sometimes it's built because an engineer decides,
"There has to be a better way."
...and then spends the next four hours proving it.
If you also think life is too short for 1× playback
You can check out the extension here:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/video-speed-controller/bchhfmheadjngmiombmecacggjfhigdp
If it saves you from sitting through one painfully slow tutorial, then those hours I spent building it were probably worth it.
Top comments (1)
And yes 6x speed was a necessity