webrtcHacks celebrates our 10th birthday today 🎂. To commemorate this day, I’ll cover 2 topics here:
- Our new merch store
- Some stats and trends looking back on 10 years of posts
We have the Merch
In the early days of webrtcHacks, co-founder Reid Stidolph ordered a bunch of stickers which proved to be extremely popular. I did an additional sticker order in the years since, but unfortunately, I don’t get to see you all in person very often ☹.
So, to help address that, I setup a merchandise store. This is handled via a third-party seller that does fulfillment in most of the world. Check it out by clicking “Merch” in the menu, or just got to merch.webrtchacks.com. Costs are roughly what I pay for each item. I hope shipping costs are reasonable for your region.
As a special birthday gift, we will be sending a discount code for a free t-shirt (or equivalent value, excluding shipping) to all past webrtcHacks contributors. That is anyone who authored a post or was interviewed for one. Those will be arriving in your email over the next 48 hours or so.
For anyone else, or contributors who want more, please visit the store. Please give me your feedback on the experience.
Analyzing 10 years of posts
I occasionally review the site’s stats to look for ideas. I share some of these below.
Interesting stats
Here are some stats and winners:
- Number of contributors: 73: I counted a total of seventy-three names attributed as authors including twenty-five interview subjects (some of which were also authors)
- Most frequent guest author: Gustavo Garcia with seven posts and one interview since 2014. Philipp “Fippo” Hancke, co-founder Victor Pascual Ávila, and I had more, but I am not counting editors
- Most popular post of all time: Anatomy of a WebRTC SDP – most of our posts on SDP question its existence, so it is somewhat ironic our most popular post is our interactive SDP guide. Originally by Anton Roma, we hacked together an interactive guide based on his original line-by-line annotation.
- Most viral post: Dear NY Times, if you’re going to hack people, at least do it cleanly! – Fippo’s expose on the use of the RTCPeerConnection API back in 2015 for fingerprinting was our first post to really get any attention outside of the immediate RTC community.
- Longest post: How Go-based Pion attracted WebRTC Mass – Q&A with Sean Dubois – at 8500 words, my interview with Sean about Pion back in 2021 about the fast-growing Go-project he started was a long one. All of our interviews tend to be on the longer side. The longest non-interview was my 5541-word Computer Vision on the Web with WebRTC and TensorFlow that included a lot of code.
Keyword Trends
318,437 total words over 10 years provides enough data to reveal some interesting trends. So, I asked ChatGPT to help analyze the post content.
What are the most frequent words?
I looked to see what words and two-word combos showed up the most across our existing posts:
Video gets a lot more attention than audio – maybe we should fix that. I was also surprised to see server shows up more than browser. “SDP” is our 12th most popular term.
I was also curious to see how these terms changed over time. Here they are visualized as a word-cloud:
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And all the images as an animated gif:
You can see how we shifted from covering “video”, “media” and NAT traversal into topics like ObjectRTC and SDP more after a couple of years. Edge was a big topic in 2016. 2019 was the year of “fuzzing”. “Audio” got its time to shine in 2020. 2021 and 2022 had a lot of mention of pion and mediasoup respectively – likely due to my lengthy interviews on those. Finally, you can see “video processing’ and WebCodecs consuming much of 2023, which shouldn’t be a surprise if you have been following us lately.
webrtcHacks in 2033?
What will RTC look like in another 10 years? I can speculate, but we generally don’t do long-term futurism and I have some shirts to ship. I do very much look forward to continuing the journey there with you!
{“author”: “chad hart“}
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