Do We Need WebRTC Events?

Yes. We do need WebRTC events. Which is why you should join us at Kranky Geek next week.

I’ve been asked a few times in the past several months by people about events to go to.

Should I go to that event? Will it help me with my current WebRTC project?

What event should I go to, considering I am in need of WebRTC technology?

Where can I travel to learn about WebRTC? Is there a specific event?

Which event will guide me towards what I need with WebRTC? Have me understand the market dynamics? Be a place to mingle with the industry?

The problem with events and WebRTC

If you’re in telecom, then this is how you see WebRTC:

For telecom, WebRTC is just a piece of telecom. An evolution of it. Some way of getting the telecom and VoIP infrastructure into a web browser.

If you’re in web development, then this is how you see WebRTC:

For web developers, WebRTC seems just like another piece of the HTML5 technology stack. You learn a few JS APIs. Maybe some nifty CSS and a few HTML5 tags and you’re done.

And this is how I see WebRTC:

Now, most WebRTC related events so far have been initiated by people in the telecom industry. The end result is usually a very narrow prism of what WebRTC is what it is capable of achieving. And the side tracks done in the web related events? Most of them end up explaining what WebRTC is, not going nearly deep enough.

The end result has been unsatisfying. At least for me.

This was one of the reasons I started Kranky Geek along with the help of Chris Koehncke some 4 years ago. We’ve since had Chad Hart join.

4 years into it, the question starts to crop up – do we still need WebRTC events?

Why do we still need WebRTC events?

Is there still room with a WebRTC centric theme to it?

Shouldn’t WebRTC just be wrapped into all the telecom, communications and web events out there and be done with it?

I mean, we’ve got enough meetup groups around the world for this technology, but who wants to attend a longer event on WebRTC?

I think it boils down to that illustration up there – the one where WebRTC is smack in the middle of VoIP (telecom) and the web (internet). In a way, we’re still figuring out what that means exactly. How does the infrastructure of such a thing needs to be designed; how do you scale it; what kind of monitoring mechanisms do you need to have in place; what’s the team sizes, resources and time needed to get something from a proof of concept to production.

WebRTC might not be new, but the fact that it relies on a mix of technologies and disciplines make for a rather complex and interesting ecosystem.

Join us at Kranky Geek SF 2017

Our next Kranky Geek event takes place on October 27 in San Francisco.

Kranky Geek is about WebRTC developers. Our role is to educate and share the experience coming from developers to developers.

The theme we’ve selected this time is twofold: implementation and beyond RTC.

1. Implementation: Production ready systems. Those that have battle scars and live to tell their story. We have companies who’ve been running WebRTC in production, at scale for quite some time, and now they are here to explain what they are doing – the challenges they faced and the solutions they came up with
2. Beyond RTC: You’ve probably heard a word or two about VR, AR, NLP, AI – acronyms that seem to be capturing the news and the imagination lately. We’ve decided to bring in a few experts in this field to explain how that fits into the story of WebRTC

We reached out to Youenn Fablet, who works on the WebKit WebRTC implementation. He will be speaking about iOS and Safari support of WebRTC.

Google will talk about their progress and roadmap of WebRTC.

Talking about Implementations, we will have Atlassian, Facebook, Peer5, Slack and Vidyo- each talking about different aspects of implementations and scaling.

Affectiva, TokBox, Twilio and VoiceBase will cover issues beyond RTC.

For our end-of-day session, we will have a repeat speaker at Kranky Geek – Philipp Hancke from appear.in – working his way around NSFW. Knowing Philipp (and seeing his draft slides), you definitely want to stick around for this one.

There’s a token admission fee in place, to control headcount and showups (free events tend to be under-attended, and we’re shifting away from that). The way this event ends up being funded is by our sponsors, who make this thing happen at all. They are part of our speakers and play an important role in the event itself.

This time, we’ve got Frozen Mountain, Google, Tokbox, Twilio, Vidyo and VoiceBase as our sponsors.

See you at Kranky Geek.