“I knew of a couple of sites and apps that did that, but I don’t like installing apps, and I didn’t like the friction involved in using a site,” the developer says. He said he preferred to download the videos to watch them offline, but couldn’t find any easy way to do so. Internet access where he lives can be spotty, and the Twitter app’s video experience was not ideal. Shalvah explains he got the idea because it was a personal pain point. However, the Twitter video downloader bot has become one of his more popular creations, and is now seeing around 7,500 user requests per day, and as many as 9,500 at peak times. He builds apps in his spare time as side projects, and has previously open-sourced other bots like which lets you set reminders by tweets, and TwitterThrowback, which is like Twitter’s version of Facebook’s “On This Day” feature. Today, Shalvah works full-time as a remote software engineer for an engineering consultancy and product design company in South Africa called Deimos Cloud. He went to university and then quit, and began working in the tech industry. Since then, Shalvah moved from C++ to Android development, then web development. That was how I started writing C++,” he says. I watched those at home that day and went back the next day to buy the actual software (the IDE). I’d won a laptop in a competition a few months back, so the next day, I walked into the only computer shop I knew and asked them for ‘Programming videos.’ They gave me something on C++. “I watched a command-line quiz application he’d made, and I was impressed. “I had no idea what it was then,” he continues. “There was a kid in a lower class that people talked about in awe - ‘he knows programming!,'” explains Shalvah.
Shalvah says he got into development back in 2013, during his final year of secondary school (high school). The idea for comes from Shalvah Adebayo, a backend developer born and raised in Nigeria, and currently living in Lagos. The handy bot (aka DownloadThisVideo) offers a way to download both videos and GIFs from Twitter’s site for easier offline viewing. You may recall seeing requests to the Thread Reader app bot to “unroll” a long thread into readable copy, for example, and in more recent days you may have spotted Twitter users tagging a newer bot, on tweets with a video file attached.
Not all the bots on Twitter are spammers or democracy hackers.
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