📰 Dev.to · Maxim Osovsky

I tested 7 ways to download YouTube videos from a server. All failed except buying residential proxies. Here's the cost analysis.

I tried DPAPI, CDP, rookiepy, OAuth2, and Bearer tokens to extract Chrome cookies. All failed. Firefox solved it in 10 lines of Python.

I needed a VPS for my video merging backend. Alibaba Cloud made me try 7 different instance/zone/disk combinations before one finally worked.

I tried to deploy a Telegram bot to Oracle Cloud Free Tier. After 2 hours of UI bugs, capacity errors, and a card-locked account — I switched to Fly.io.

How a personal pain of merging hours of strategy session recordings turned into a self-hosted video merging service — and 3 production bugs I didn't see coming.

A 14-year journey from hand-printed calendars to a zero-dependency SVG generator — with plotter printing, Miro integration, and a PDF bug that looked correct on

A zero-dependency browser tool that turns your entire life into a printable Gantt chart — born from real strategic sessions, not a tutorial.

A serverless Telegram bot that converts one message into a timezone-aware meeting card with Google Calendar link and personal DM reminders.

I built a landing page promising "Deploy to anywhere as easily as Vercel." Then I actually tried to deploy something. The gap between the promise and reality wa