Fast and secure gif making.

codeGithublive

Working at a company with a lot of sensitive data like IBM made me realize the danger of uploading stuff to places you don't trust;

And as a person who makes gifs for my friends regularly, I got concerned! What if some shady conversion website is laughing at my friend's grimace face?

The natural course of action as a programmer was to make the tool myself, this way I can rest assured that no data is going anywhere.

The dream was alive, making gifs without sending anything to any server, but how the f#@% would I do it?

After doing my research, I discovered that javascript (the programming language that runs on the browser) is HORRIBLE at encoding; But I knew what was great at it: the C programming language, especially with a library called FFMPEG, using it makes transforming any video file into a gif as simple as writing one line in a console.

The next question was: “how can I run C with FFMPEG in the browser?”, and searching it on google was helpful. It turns out I can very easily run C with something called Web Assembly.

My luck wasn't even close to stopping; At this point, I found a Github repository  that did exactly what I wanted to do; And as a good programmer, I Yoinked it! After some bug fixing and updates, including remaking the state management and creating a UI from scratch, I was set.

I finally have a gif-making tool that my friends and I can trust without a doubt.