Research WebRTC — Not the API

Work from the brief alone. Write what you would produce — actors, requirements, data, a first slice, your unknowns — before opening anything below it; the exercise stops working if you read the reality first.

The brief you were given

The chat app needs video calls and nobody on the team has used WebRTC. You have one day. Produce a one-page report answering: what problem it solves, what concepts matter, what it guarantees and how it fails, what the alternatives are, and what the smallest experiment is. The report must not describe the API.

Your attempt

Nothing here is checked. It exists so that the reveal below is a comparison rather than a reading.

The trap — the move that looks like progress and is not

Building a working video call by following a tutorial. It runs on one machine on one network, it demonstrates beautifully, and it answers none of the report's questions — least of all what happens on the customer's office network, where the peer-to-peer connection the tutorial relied on does not form.

Read this even if you are confident. It is here rather than behind a button because it is the move most people actually make, it produces things that look like a project, and its cost arrives when the first hard requirement has nowhere to go.