First off, I was super excited to have an excuse to work on a side project with a deadline and an end goal. As well as have a chance to try hosting my project on DigitalOcean App Platform.
Usually taking time to work on a side project is difficult because the project may be fun but not have a clear way to make money or a project may have a way to make money/be successful but then can feel like regular work.
This is a great balance between working on something I enjoy and being able to share with the community and also win a contest.
Now to the first steps.
First steps
What to work on? So many projects so little time.
Three projects came to mind for this contest.
- Covid related dashboard or something related to tracking helpful covid data.
- A QA app to track test cases in test suites to be run by QA engineers.
- A video chat app.
The covid dashboard would be an interesting project to work on, but with a short timeline, it's not something I would want to start. It would take more time to research and more effort than I could give right now.
The QA application is something that has been on my list for a while. I had previously built an MVP that works well enough to build user stories and run through tests. Unfortunately, I built it 2 years ago and know so much more about development and what I would want out of the QA project that I may as well rewrite the entire application. This is a useful application that is on my list but once again would take too much time.
So that leaves the video chat app.
The video chat app
I am a Development Manager and Video Engineer as my full-time job and love working on video applications. On my list for a long time is a video application using WebRTC.
A few months ago I listened to an episode of Syntax.fm that interviewed a developer talking about a simple video chat application they built. It is a great episode about learning new technology and building a simple app while learning. That along with the changing landscape of video moving towards WebRTC made this a great application to build right now.
So that's what I set out to build! Oh also the app won't just be between peers it will be between a max of three. So added a bit more of a challenge there.
Let's lay out what we need for the project:
- Landing page
- A page to create a new call
- A page for the video chat to take place
- Pages to direct unsupported browsers to
- All of the business logic of connecting users with WebRTC and keeping them connected
I won't go too deep into every part of every feature. But in my next post, I'll give some high-level overviews of everything listed above.
Top comments (2)
How do you make style list like that (in 4 part series table list)? is possible if used markdown?
It is a dev.to feature. Here is a writeup about it: dev.to/kallmanation/dev-to-writing...