I threw together the original webrtcHacks design in several hours without really knowing what I was doing, not sure if it would really matter anyway. 13 months later we have 49 posts and 14-15,000 unique visitors a month. My work with WebRTC has also given me a much greater appreciation for modern web design and have become increasingly bothered by our design’s shortcomings. Not to mention – well, many of you have mentioned it – it is really tough to read a 3500 word technical article when you have a crappy font and poor contrast.
Other
webrtcH4cKS: ~ Survey results: and the WebRTC developers say…
We ran a short developer survey with BlogGeek.me a couple weeks ago (see this post). We received 97 respondents as of last Friday, August 1. Tsahi randomly selected 3 winners – he has contacted them already so if you did not get his email we are sorry to say you did not win 2 free ebooks. However, you are still eligible for a 20% discount, and should have received an email with instructions with coupon codes.
97 respondents certainly is not a statistically valid sample size from a pool of thousands of active WebRTC developers (maybe more), but there several useful data points we can extract from the data.
webrtcH4cKS: ~ WebRTC developers – we need 60 seconds
The webrtcHacks and BlogGeek.me WebRTC Developer survey will only take a minute
We happy share a lot of information here at webrtcHacks, but now we have a request of you. We have partnered with BlogGeek.me to conduct a super-quick, 6-question WebRTC developer survey. You will benefit from seeing analysis of the data here and on BlogGeek.me. As an extra bonus, Tsahi got Packt Publishing to agree to giving away 2 free digital books to 3 respondents and give a 20% discount on these books to everyone else who responds.
Please click here to go to the survey.
Rules
- Take the 60 seconds or less it will take to answer the 6 questions here
- You need to provide your email if you want to be part of the raffle and get the discount coupons. It won’t be used for anything else. If you don’t believe us and don’t want the prize then leave it blank
- We are only keeping the survey open until the end of this week, so answer it now (seriously, it will only take a minute!)
- Please ask your WebRTC developer friends to complete this too
Prizes
As mentioned above, if you are the type that needs some compensation (or a chance for it) for the 60 seconds that this will take, Packt is donating 2 books to this effort:
webrtcH4cKS: ~ The new webrtcHacks team member you already know!
Tsahi Levant-Levi – blogger at BlogGeek.me
If you just care about our developer-oriented content and could care less about how we actually author and coordinate this site then skip this post. We have some great content coming from Victor later this week.
If you are interested in more than that then please read on.
We have a new team member:
[drum roll..]
Tsahi Levant-Levi.
You already know him as the bloggeek.me guy. He blogs, writes reports, speaks, runs events, and consults on WebRTC. He was the first to have an independent WebRTC blog and he has the largest following of anyone in this small, but growing WebRTC community.
webrtcH4cKS: ~ webrtcHacks Meetup at Mobile World Congress (MWC)
Next week Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2014 will take place in Barcelona, Spain. Since Barcelona is my hometown, it’s always a great opportunity to meet with industry friends and enjoy some local spots together.
Many webrtcHackers will be in Barcelona for the event, so we are organizing a meetup next Tuesday at 6PM CET. This event will be largely a social meet & greet but we will have some structured conversation to discuss the latest in WebRTC and developer needs. We will update with exact location details within the Fira Gran Via prior to the event but we will likely meet in one of the food court areas between center the exhibit halls.
webrtcH4cKS: ~ In case you missed it… webrtcHacks after 4 months
We have been at this now for 4 months. I am not a big fan of recap posts – you deserve original content. However, many of our readers are relatively new to webrtcHacks and our navigation system for finding old posts needs much improvement. It is a slow week with the US/Canada holiday so we figure this is a good time for you to catch up on some posts you may have missed. Here is a quick recap of our 21 posts and various pages so far.
In the Beginning
It all started here, with our first post – Welcome to webrtcHacks – a blog for WebRTC makers. There is no reason for you to read this unless you are nostalgic or really want to see our motivations for starting webrtcHacks.
webrtcH4cKS: ~ Help Typhoon Victims in the Philippines
webrtcHacks employs 2 personnel from the Philippines – Shem, our administrator and Stefan, our web master. Fortunately they are both ok after Typhoon Haiyan, but they are surrounded by utter devastation. Stefan’s region was badly affected and they are without utilities.
Shem is helping to organize local relief efforts across her country. If you would like to help make a direct donation, you can do so via PayPal at shemdavoc@gmail.com or with Xoom at:
Bank: Bank of the Philippine Islands
Currency of the receiver: Peso
Name: Cherry Mae Davoc
Account Number: 9249143666
Complete Address: Quirino St., Badiangan, Iloilo City, Philippines
Phone Number: 639084159200
WebRTC is gaining traction, and there are exciting changes underway. The WebRTC Conference and Expo III at the Santa Clare Convention Center November 19-21 will focus on the information you need to deliver WebRTC based solutions in your environment. The Developer track includes six extended workshops where the experts will show you how to optimize your WebRTC development. With topics from a tutorial and training through how to deploy WebRTC, signaling, using the data channel and mobile deployments, these sessions will give you the insights your need to deploy right the first time. In addition, a special session with actual users of the best tools in the industry will let you decide which is best to use for your development.
Last week I attended the Illinois Institute of Technology Real-Time Communications (IIT-RTC) Conference in Chicago. This event has a history of attracting key players from around the RTC world. It features discussion that is distilled down to the key trends and technology challenges in the industry, with very little “fluff” on top. This year the IIT-RTC conference was co-located with IPTComm as well, adding to the quality of the content.
Topics at the conference touched on many segments of RTC, including IMS, RCS, E-911, OTT, and more. Our own Victor Pascual sits on the steering committee for the Web and Emerging Technologies track, where WebRTC was given particular focus. It began with a fantastic WebRTC tutorial from Alan Johnston (co-author of the SIP specification and a dozen other IETF RFCs) and Dan Burnett (co-editor of the W3C WebRTC specification). They are also both co-authors of “WebRTC: APIs and RTCWeb Protocols of the HTML5 Real-Time Web”, and provided a fantastic expert introduction to WebRTC APIs and methodologies. This set the tone for lots of excellent presentation, expert perspective, demonstrations, and discussion on WebRTC over the next few days. Here are some discussions I found particularly interesting:
webrtcH4cKS: ~ Introducing the WebRTC Event Directory
There are a bunch of WebRTC events coming up and I guess we like lists. We thought it would be good idea to take our internal event lists and post them. We did some research to see what other events were out there and found a bunch more. Text tables are boring, so we spruced up the data presentation a bit and BAM! We now have a WebRTC Event Directory.
Methodology
WebRTC is a hot topic that will be covered in many long-running web and telecom industry events. To be included here we require the WebRTC to be a specific topic area or track that gets more than a nominal focus if it is part of a larger event. Running special pre or post-event workshops dedicated to WebRTC seems to be a common trend.
