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What I have built and what it taught me

Write-ups of real projects: a video rendering service, two Facebook games, an app store tool and an open-source Docker image. What the problem was, how we solved it and what went wrong on the way.

Written by Philippe Schommers, who built the work described.

  1. Web video engineeringLaunched 20259 min read

    How to record a webpage as video: building a 60 FPS HTML-to-MP4 pipeline

    A screenshot is one frame. A video is thousands of them, each captured at the right moment, with sound that stays in step and a page that behaves identically every time you run it. I built Pagecorder to do that reliably, and this is what the job actually involves.

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  2. Game development case studyLaunched 20198 min read

    How Know Your Friends reached 130 million players on Facebook Instant Games

    Know Your Friends started with one small idea: how well do your friends actually know you? It ended up in front of more than 130 million people, peaked above four million players a day and shipped in 27 languages. The numbers are the headline. What the game had to get right to earn them is the more useful part.

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  3. SaaS product retrospectiveLaunched 201810 min read

    What we learned building an automated app store optimisation platform

    TapTimize was an app store optimisation tool for small app teams, the ones who cannot spend every day researching keywords in a dozen countries. It tracked rankings, pulled apart store data and suggested wording for listings. The company is gone, but almost everything we learned building it still applies.

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  4. Small-team product retrospectiveLaunched 20186 min read

    Building CUTE: what a two-person team learned shipping a Facebook Instant Game

    CUTE was a Facebook Instant Game that two of us launched in 2018. It never got near the scale of Know Your Friends, but it is the clearer example of what a very small team can do when the product, the technology and the way you work are all kept deliberately within reach.

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  5. Open-source infrastructureOpen-sourced 20217 min read

    Why we built an unofficial Docker image for the 3CX SBC

    The 3CX Session Border Controller fixes a real networking headache for offices full of desk phones. The official way to install it expects a machine of its own. We packaged it as a Docker image instead, for people already running their branch services in containers, while being clear that this is not a configuration 3CX supports.

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