What Editing Taught Me About Timing
Three years of YouTuber vlogs taught me timing — turns out UI runs on the same instinct.
Overview
Video editing was never a means to an end — I've loved movies, shooting footage, and telling stories since school, and editing was just where that love went first.
I worked it both ways, full-time and freelance — mostly cutting vlogs for YouTubers, the kind of footage that has to earn every second or someone clicks away.
Somewhere in there I picked up a second dream — frontend development — not because one led to the other, but because I wanted both :)
The craft
Editing is mostly a timing problem. Every cut is a bet on how long a viewer's attention holds before the shot needs to change — hold too long and it drags, cut too soon and nothing registers. You don't learn that from a rulebook, you learn it by scrubbing the same ten seconds a hundred times until the rhythm feels right.
This showreel is two minutes of that. Fair warning: it moves fast — ADHD editing haha. And honestly? Past-me looked pretty hyperactive.
What carried over
None of that instinct went away when I switched to writing components. It just changed medium:
- A transition duration: isn't a number I copy from a default — it's the same gut check as a cut point.
- prefers-reduced-motion: isn't just a media query to satisfy — it's the same respect for a viewer's patience I learned watching people click away the moment a cut ran long.
- Most of the job: is still deciding what doesn't make it onto the screen.
The archive
The rest of that era lives in two places — a site built to walk through the cuts individually, and a PDF for anyone who'd rather flip through it than click.
The web version doubles as something else, too: it's the very first thing I ever coded and shipped myself, back when I was teaching myself just enough to get a portfolio online. Still a little proud of it.