Sameer Ali is one of those developers who, when faced with repetitive tasks, develops an app to fix them. He’s also a creator who posts coding content on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube under the name “coding.kitty” – and his “build-an-app” approach was exactly what led to him removing almost the entire admin from his social presence.
Previously, each finished video meant 15-20 minutes of labor-intensive work: downloading, re-uploading to each platform, rewriting subtitles, setting metadata, scheduling, and manually updating his project board. Its custom desktop app – the aptly named Coding.kitty engine – completely changed that. It manages the entire production pipeline from ideation and scripting to subtitling, planning and analysis.
But when it came to actually releasing the videos on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, even Sameer decided not to create that part himself. Instead, he turned to Buffer’s API.
Why a full-stack engineer chose not to build it yourself
Sameer could have used the native APIs of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. But that would have meant three separate OAuth flows, three different upload mechanisms, three sets of rate limits, and a custom scheduler service to ensure everything runs on time. He described it as building an entire product on top of the product he was already building.
Instead, Buffer takes care of everything.
A GraphQL API, authentication flow, and Sameer can pass YouTube titles, privacy settings, categories, Instagram Reel vs. Post Type, first comments, and TikTok titles through a single mutation. The complete integration worked within a few days.
“I want a guarantee that my posts will be published at the specified time,” says Sameer. “Buffer does the planning part reliably and I can see everything in a calendar view.”
He also liked that the GraphQL schema covered everything he needed in one place: create, delete, retrieve posts, retrieve channels – without having to stitch together separate endpoints.
From 1 YouTube video to multiple posts in 2 minutes
As a long-time developer and marketer, I can’t believe how efficient Sameer’s app and buffer API workflow is.
It begins when a video is marked as “ready to schedule” in Jira. The Coding.kitty engine automatically picks it up, downloads the captioned video from the Jira attachment, and automatically resizes it to fit the vertical format of Instagram Reels. The video is uploaded to Sameer’s cloud storage and is accessible via a public URL.
From there, Sameer selects the target platforms, generates a platform-specific caption (its built-in AI knows the character limits and conventions for each platform, so he doesn’t rewrite the exact same message three times), and scrolls through the video to select a thumbnail.
Then “coding.kitty” hits Buffer CreatePost GraphQL mutation that contains the video URL, caption, thumbnail and all platform-specific metadata. Buffer fetches the video from R2, queues it for publishing, and the Jira ticket automatically moves to the next column.
Two minutes, done.
A calendar and intelligent post planning
As if that wasn’t enough, Sameer has integrated a few more practical functions into his app. For starters, its own calendar view.
Coding.kitty also recalls scheduled posts from the buffer to display its own calendar view. Sameer can identify gaps in his schedule, avoid posting conflicts, and reschedule content by rescheduling posts—all without leaving his app.
And perhaps my favorite bonus feature: an AI agent that makes all publishing decisions.
Since Coding.kitty has access to recent posts and the entire queue of videos, Sameer can leave the publishing decision entirely to the agent. It checks what has been recently posted, selects the right content, platform and timing, and schedules it through the Buffer API.
Pretty cool, right?
Try it yourself
Sameer has developed a desktop app. You can create a CLI tool, a Slack bot, or an N8N workflow. Whatever you create, you can focus on it – the publishing task is already solved.
Buffer’s API is now available. You can start building today.
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