Engineering decisions for my video call tool

Source: Dev.to

WebChat

A PeerJS‑based browser‑to‑browser video conferencing app with low‑latency, high‑performance real‑time communication.

This project pushed me deep into the internals of infrastructure optimization.

Key Engineering Decisions

• Engineered a combined signaling server: integrating Express.js, Socket.IO and PeerJS into a single‑process, single‑port architecture that runs with a single command.
• This design avoids typical multi‑service deployment constraints and runs smoothly on a single (free‑tier as of now) instance.
• Solved a tricky issue of duplicate video streams using PeerJS ID deduplication logic.
• Enabled dynamic participation via URL‑based session joins, with full leave/rejoin support for participants.
• Focused on ultra‑low latency media exchange and snappy UI responsiveness.
• Used ngrok to tunnel the local development server, enabling testing across different devices and network environments by exposing the localhost port via a secure public URL.

Stack

• PeerJS
• Socket.IO
• Express.js
• EJS
• Node.js

Live link

https://webchat-fa0u.onrender.com