Core problem
Coming from a world of simple REST APIs, WebRTC felt like trying to perform surgery in the dark. I was suddenly drowning in an alphabet soup of SDP, ICE candidates, and STUN/TURN servers. My first attempts were met with a soul-crushing silence. My console was just a graveyard of “Connection Failed” errors, while my cat, Milo, watched me lose my mind over network protocols.
The breakthrough came when I realized the server wasn’t just a mailbox; it was a choreographer. Once I stopped copy-pasting and started mapping the “handshake” between browsers, the magic happened. After days of debugging, I finally heard it—my own voice echoing back through the AI.
The lesson? Real-time dev is chaotic, but hearing your code finally “talk” back makes every ICE negotiation failed error worth it.