Virus Cafe: Make a friend in 2 minutes ↦
Hey folks! I built Virus Cafe to help you make a friend in 2 minutes! My goal is to help people stuck indoors because of COVID-19 (or police curfews) to make meaningful connections with strangers.
Here’s how it works:
- You are matched with a random partner for a video chat
- You’re given a deep question to discuss. You have 2 minutes!
- The only rule is: no small talk!
Small talk is the worst and I’m on a mission to eradicate it. I’ve expertly crafted over 200 questions designed to stimulate good conversation and skip past the boring introductions.
Here are a few samples:
- When in your life have you been the happiest?
- What would you be willing to die for?
- What is the biggest lie you’ve told without getting caught?
- What is a belief you had as a child that you no longer have?
- What human emotion do you fear the most?
- If a family member murdered someone, would you report them to the police?
- What absolutely excites you right now?
I hope you use Virus Cafe to meet a new friend and make a deep connection today.
Discussion
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Feross Aboukhadijeh
San Francisco, CA
I’m Feross Aboukhadijeh, an entrepreneur, programmer, open source maintainer, startup founder, and mad scientist.
I build web apps like Wormhole, a simple, fast, private file sharing website, BitMidi, a free MIDI database, and Play, a music video app, and Study Notes, a site to help students study better and get into college.
I also build WebTorrent, a torrent library for the web, WebTorrent Desktop, the best desktop torrent app, and Standard JS, a JavaScript linter.
2020-06-04T19:41:50Z ago
Here are the technical details in case anyone is interested:
The video and voice chat is powered by WebRTC. The getUserMedia API allows a browser to access the webcam and microphone of the device. I used my own simple-peer (https://github.com/feross/simple-peer) library to make WebRTC a bit easier to work with.
The server is Node.js. I’m using Next.js for the first time on this project. I usually use a custom Express server for my projects. I’m a fan of several of Next.js’s decisions – it feels really nice to use, if a bit limiting sometimes.
I use the ‘ws’ package (https://github.com/websockets/ws) to implement a WebSocket server which is used to help the peers get connected over WebRTC. Once peers are connected, all video and video is transferred directly in a peer-to-peer fashion.
Except sometimes the connection can’t be established, so to improve reliability of WebRTC you need to set up a TURN relay server for those situations. I used coturn (https://github.com/coturn/coturn) for that.
Lastly, I used Chakra UI (https://chakra-ui.com/) as my React component library.
Really happy with how the easy the app has been to build.
The most difficult part was getting it to work on Safari for iOS. I spent about 50% of the effort working around various bugs in the Safari media stack. https://twitter.com/feross/status/1263544033135038464
Hope this was informative! Lmk if you have any other questions!
Feross
Jerod Santo
Bennington, Nebraska
Jerod co-hosts The Changelog, crashes JS Party & takes out the trash (his old code) once in awhile.
2020-06-04T19:46:02Z ago
I love the concept! I’m not 💯 on the name, though. Has anybody else pushed back on it? It just doesn’t seem like a welcoming place. Why would I want to go a Virus Cafe?
Feross Aboukhadijeh
San Francisco, CA
I’m Feross Aboukhadijeh, an entrepreneur, programmer, open source maintainer, startup founder, and mad scientist.
I build web apps like Wormhole, a simple, fast, private file sharing website, BitMidi, a free MIDI database, and Play, a music video app, and Study Notes, a site to help students study better and get into college.
I also build WebTorrent, a torrent library for the web, WebTorrent Desktop, the best desktop torrent app, and Standard JS, a JavaScript linter.
2020-06-04T22:00:14Z ago
Yeah, there’s been some push back. But the name also draws attention and it’s topical. Eventually, I agree that I’ll probably have to rename it.