Zoom

Before Product Hunt, I spent several years building a competitor to Zoom (not successful, but quite rewarding). I’m left with a healthy appreciation for how difficult these tools are to build - in fact, they may be one of the most complex, unreliable tools that we use on a daily basis. On the surface, video chat seems simple, but under the hood there are a myriad of adaptations and tradeoffs that are being made every few milliseconds in response to network and device conditions. Speed matters. Reliability matters. Resolution matters. It’s like the internet itself - dive a bit under the surface and there be dragons.