Ring Upp - DO Hackathon - Part 1/4 - First Steps

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.

1. Covid related dashboard or something related to tracking helpful covid data.
2. A QA app to track test cases in test suites to be run by QA engineers.
3. 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.