Wasla

Overview

Wasla is a video learning platform built around a simple idea: YouTube is full of great courses, but it is not built like a classroom. Wasla imports channels and playlists by ID, handle, or URL, then turns them into structured courses with progress tracking, categories, and search.

The challenge

The YouTube Data API gives you a lot of raw material but no course structure. The challenge was to model channels, playlists, and videos in a way that felt like a curriculum — without asking the user to organize everything by hand.

The approach

I built a React 19 front end with a Tailwind CSS interface that defaults to Arabic and switches cleanly to English. The Express API handles channel resolution and playlist imports; the UI groups videos into course-like units, stores progress locally, and lets you resume where you left off.

What it does

• Import channels by ID, handle, or URL
• Turn playlists into structured courses
• Track progress and resume playback
• Filter and search by category, time range, and sort order
• Bilingual interface with Arabic as the default
• Responsive, progressive web app experience

Technical notes

• React 19 + Tailwind CSS front end
• Node.js + Express 5 API layer
• YouTube Data API for channel and playlist metadata
• Vercel deployment

What I learned

Wasla taught me how much product thinking lives inside a data model. The difference between a playlist and a course is not technical — it is a set of assumptions about how people learn. Building the bilingual UI also forced me to design the layout for both directions from the start.