Youtube-dl
It's very nice to see a project I started reach the front page of HN.I remember starting the project around 2006. Back then, I had a dial-up connection and it wasn't easy for me to watch a video I liked a second time. It took ages. There were Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox that weren't working when I tried them, so I decided to start a new project in Python, using the standard urllib2. I made it command line because I thought it was a better approach for batch downloads and I had no experience writing GUI applications (and I still don't have much).The first version was a pretty simple script that read the webpages and extracted the video URL from them. No objects or functions, just the straight work. I adapted the code for a few other websites and started adding some more features, giving birth to metacafe-dl and other projects.The raise in popularity came in 2008, when Joe Barr (RIP) wrote an article about it for Linux.com.[1] It suddenly became much more popular and people started to request more features and support for many more sites.So in 2008 the program was rewritten from scratch with support multiple video sites in mind, using a simple design (with some defects that I regret, but hey it works anyway!) that more or less survives until now. Naturally, I didn't change the name of the program. It would lose the bit of popularity it had. I should have named it something else from the start, but I didn't expect it to be so popular. One of these days we're going to be sued for trademark infringement.In 2011 I stepped down as the maintainer due to lack of time, and the project is since then maintained by the amazing youtube-dl team which I always take an opportunity to thank for their great work.[2] The way I did this is simply by giving push access to my repository in Github. It's the best thing I did for the project bar none. Philipp Hagemeister[3] has been the head of the maintainers since then, but the second contributor, for example, was Filippo Valsorda[4], of Heartbleed tester[5] fame and now working for Cloudflare.[1] http://archive09.linux.com/articles/114161
[2] http://rg3.name/201408141628.html
[3] https://github.com/phihag
[4] https://github.com/filosottile
[5] https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/