YouTube Digest
March 7th, 2026
As I reviewed my habits in 2025 I realized that I was spending more time than I wanted watching videos on YouTube. I enjoy watching long-form educational and infotainment content on YouTube, however I find it's pretty easy to get pulled into watching too many Shorts if I'm not careful.
To reduce that distraction, I built a tool that sends me a daily email featuring only newly published videos from the channels I subscribe to. With the help of AI, I developed a Python application that connects to the YouTube API and uses the Subscriptions endpoint to retrieve my subscribed channels.
The application loops through each channel, fetches recent uploads, and compiles any videos published within the last 48 hours into a single email digest. I chose a 48-hour window so I’d have two opportunities to decide whether a video was worth watching without feeling pressure to keep up in real time.
The project runs inside a Docker container deployed on Google Cloud Run, which gave me an opportunity to learn a new deployment platform. I also configured the application to run in AWS Fargate for portability across cloud providers.
Please contact me if you are interested in the code for this project.
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