Recently, some code I hacked on for work made its way onto Hacker News, where it got a decent amount of attention. Nothing crazy, but enough that I was pleasantly surprised.

The code in question is node-webrtc, specifically, my fork of it. This is an NPM package for letting NodeJS access WebRTC APIs normally only accessible in browsers. It does this by taking the original libwebrtc source code and plugging it into Node Native Addon bindings that closely mirror the ones in the WebRTC specification.

I needed to fork this package because the original became unmaintained in 2021, and had suffered enough bitrot when it came to the Node Native Addon side of things that it no longer worked with the latest Node LTS (18). In order to use it in our codebase (for various reasons), it needed to be upgraded.

In addition to the upgrade of the APIs, I also started to upgrade the version of libwebrtc it was building against, also because our code needed features from slightly newer versions. I upgraded it from M87 to M94, going through M90 and M92 first, and am in the middle of upgrading to M98. These incremental steps proved to be the best option for getting things working (hard to fix things when everything is broken, better to only break a few things at a time), but means it’s slow progress towards an eventual goal of M118 and our patched version of libwebrtc.

This is all well and good, and once I was moved to another project I thought this would effectively be the end of the saga. I did want to keep working on it, but other tasks needed doing! It wasn’t until the Hacker News post came around that I caught the attention of node-webrtc’s previous maintainer, who offered to hand over ownership of the Github organization and NPM package.

So, yeah, that happened! I haven’t merged my fork back into upstream yet, nor added a new NPM package version. This is because I am still working on other tasks for Roam and haven’t put a lot of time into this library recently. I’ll keep plugging away at it when I can, and will be responsive to Github issues on the fork during normal business hours. Not sure what the appropriate channels are to make an announcement when I do make the changeover, perhaps just a note in the README.md is appropriate.

This feels surreal! Very interesting to have a codebase dumped on me like that, just because I put in the work for it. No pressure or anything since it doesn’t seem widely used, but still thinking about how to uphold a legacy and start building a reputation more. I would like to be able to devote more energy towards improving open source and building cool stuff people can see that has my name on it. Frontend work is cool and all, but this is more the stuff I signed up for really when I wanted to become a Software Engineer.