TLDR; Story of how feature from old project helped in new project
You know that feeling when you're in the final stretch of a project? The finish line is so close you can almost taste it. That's where I was last week. I was putting the final touches on the landing page for my new project, EasyAnalytica, it's a tool that lets you create dashboards in three steps.
Everything was going smoothly… almost too smoothly.
Houston, We Have a Problem
To show how easy my tool is, the landing page has a bunch of demo videos. They look great on a desktop. But when I tested the page on my phone, it was a disaster. The videos were heavy, and the page took forever to load. Nobody is going to wait that long.
"Okay, no problem," I thought. "I'll just add placeholder images. The image will show up instantly while the video loads in the background."
Simple, right? Well, then came the real problem: how do I get those images?
I needed very specific frames from the videos, the parts that best explained the feature I was talking about. My first idea was to just pause the video and take a screenshot. But the quality was bad, and I couldn't get the exact resolution of the video. My next thought was to search online for a tool that could "extract a single frame from a video." I found some complicated software and some confusing online tools, but nothing was quick and easy. My Google-fu was failing me, and I was getting frustrated.
Raiders of the Lost Side Project
After wasting time searching, I was stuck. For some reason, a thought popped into my head about an old sideproject of mine.
About a year ago, I was playing around with FFmpeg for video editing. It's an amazing command line tool, but trying to perfectly position a logo or adjust captions by typing commands like `-filter_complex "[0:v][1:v] overlay=W-w-5:H-h-5"` was driving me crazy.
So, I built a small web based video editor. It lets you edit a video visually dragging and dropping things around but instead of rendering a video file (which is slow and heavy), it just generates the FFmpeg command for you. You copy the command, paste it in your terminal, and FFmpeg does the hard work.
The project unexpectedly went viral after the official FFmpeg Twitter account tweeted about it! I got some users, and for fun, I added a tiny feature. It let you pause the video, draw on a frame, and save that single frame as a high-quality image. Nobody asked for it. I don't think anyone ever used it. I didn't even advertise it. It was just there.
Then, I got busy with other things and completely forgot about it.
Plot Twist: The Hero Was Me All Along
Sitting there, frustrated with my landing page, I decided to open up that old video editor. I don't even know why. I uploaded one of my new demo videos, just to see.
And then I saw it.
A little button I had completely forgotten I made. It said: "Save Frame."
I stared at it for a second. It's a special kind of funny when you're looking everywhere for a tool to solve your problem, and it turns out you're the one who built it and then forgot it existed.
The Frame That Saved the Landing Page
I held my breath and clicked the button.
I scrubbed through the video to the perfect moment that matched my landing page text, hit "Save Frame," and boom a perfect, high-resolution image of that exact frame was saved to my computer. The quality was the same as the original video. It was exactly what I needed.
Suddenly, my frustrating problem became a simple, 5-minute task. I loaded each demo video, found the key moment, and exported the frame. One after another. It was fast, easy, and the results were perfect. That little, useless feature I built for the heck of it became the most important tool I had that day.
Every Line of Code Has Its Day
You never know when a piece of code you wrote for fun might become the exact solution you need for a serious problem. Your past work is a toolbox. When you "scratch your own itch" and build something to solve your own problem, you often create something incredibly practical. Sometimes, the small things you add for fun or experimentation can have the most unexpected value later on.