Inspiration
We wanted to make a productivity app that would display how we browse YouTube. YouTube is an incredible resource of educational resources, but it is far too easy to fall down a rabbit hole of videos. Tracking how readily we fall down these holes is an incredibly powerful tool for improving your day to day routine
In the process of building this, we realized it would be an incredible opportunity to use generative ai to categorize these videos. Otherwise it can be quite difficult to determine the type of content of each video.
What it does
Each time you visit a YouTube video, the video is sent to our backend for processing, where it is slotted into one of two categories, and then your watch time is added to one of those two categories. When viewing the extension, the extension then tells you the breakdown of how much educational vs entertainment content you have watched.
How we built it
Our frontend is a simple stack of HTML/CSS/JS. The pie chart was handmade using the HTML5 canvas api. Our backend is written in Python with FastAPI, communicates with a MongoDB database, and makes calls to Gemini as our generative AI.
Challenges we ran into
Making web requests from the extension to our backend was by far the hardest part. It took well over half of the entire development time. We solved it with a simple Restful API.
JavaScript also has some strange quirks with when you can print to the console which made debugging hard. We solved that by writing text on the pie chart canvas with the data we wanted.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This is the first browser extension any of us have made and we're all incredibly proud for trying something new. The product also is fully finished which was our number one goal going in.
What we learned
Web standards for making requests is incredibly complicated.
What's next for Yakalytics
We will be building it out and improving the user interface. Adding some sort of user authentication would be necessary for growing as a platform in order to maintain security of browsing habits.
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