Where It All Begins 🚀

One day, I woke up 😴 and had an online physics class 📚. I quickly cleaned up 🧼 and joined the class. Days went by, and it was at the beginning of the COVID pandemic 🦠. I started thinking 🤔 about how I could automate my workload—like downloading my classes and watching them all at the end of the week 🎥. So, I wrote my first Python code 💻. I knew the basics of programming, like if and else 🤷‍♂️, but not much more at that time. To automate my tasks, I had to learn Python 🐍. I went to YouTube and watched some lessons 📺. At first, it was overwhelming 😅, but after 3-4 days, I became comfortable with Python. Then, I started writing my first program. It was trash 🗑️.

A week later, I rewrote it again and again 🔄, adding BeautifulSoup (bs4) to automate tasks 🛠️. I learned a lot—how to debug websites 🐞, understand website errors ⚠️, and identify vulnerabilities 🔍. I also learned how to manipulate APIs, fetch data 🌐, automatically log into a website 🔐, and download all the content from it in seconds ⏳.

I spent a lot of time coding ⌛, often not realizing how many hours or days had passed 🕰️. Sometimes, I coded for three days in a row 🌙. Finally, I managed to download all the content from the website 🖥️. The only problem was that I had to get up and run the script every time a class started, which wasn’t the automation I wanted 😒. So, I started working again to fully automate the process 🔧. I tried many approaches, even programming my laptop to do the task automatically with some batch scripts 💻. But every time, I had to turn my laptop on.

That’s when I realized that to fully automate the process, I needed a server to handle everything for me 🖥️. At that time, Heroku was a free service, which was perfect for me 👍. By that point, I could download all the content from the source, but I didn’t have storage for it 📦. Some files were large video files 🎞️. Then I had another idea: upload every video to YouTube privately, so only I could watch them 🎥. I was able to do this using the YouTube API, which allowed up to five videos per day for free—perfect for my needs ✅.

I connected the YouTube API with my script 🔗, so now I could download the videos to my server and automatically upload them to YouTube 📤. The reason I downloaded and uploaded the videos was that the content on the website expired after a short time frame ⏲️. With the help of my script, I could watch the lessons for free on YouTube, as Sri Lankan internet providers offered an unlimited YouTube package at a low cost 💸. The server was free, as was the YouTube API 💰. So, after setting everything up, I could download my videos automatically without disturbing my precious sleep 😴! I scheduled all the classes to do the same 🗓️.

But there was a little problem with documents 📄. So, as you might guess, I connected the script to Google Drive ☁️. Then, I was able to download every document to Drive and every video to YouTube automatically. That was a huge relief 😌, and it gave me a lot of time to manage my work 🕒.

After this journey, I learned many new things 📚, some of which amazed me 🤯. So, I started learning more about programming, cybersecurity 🔒, and other new topics. With my classes automated, I had the time to explore these areas 🌍. I learned one programming language after another and kept updating my script 📝. For example, when I learned about Firebase 🔥, it was a game-changing platform for me, and I added more features to make the automated tasks work efficiently ⚡.

After everything I did during that time, I made a decision for my future: to become a computer scientist 👨‍💻. Now, I’m pursuing a Computer Science degree at the National School of Business Management (NSBM) in Sri Lanka 🇱🇰. I hope you enjoyed! See you next time 👋!