Building Modern WebRTC Applications: Inside Deviqon’s Engineering Workflow

In collaborative software engineering projects, particularly those involving real-time communication, an engineer’s day spans far more than implementing isolated components. It involves aligning requirements across teams, navigating protocol-level constraints, managing application infrastructure, and delivering continuously evolving functionality.

At Deviqon, this type of engineering work defines several of our long-term engagements. This article highlights what a typical workday looks like for Horia, a software engineer who has been with Deviqon since 2021 and currently leads the engineering effort on a real-time communication project developed in partnership with one of the most known names in video.

Expanding Responsibilities and Technical Growth

Horia joined Deviqon at a moment when the company was expanding its engineering capabilities, initially contributing to C++-based video streaming systems. Over time, as projects shifted toward modern communication stacks, he transitioned to Go and took on additional operational responsibilities.

"This progression reflects Deviqon’s practical engineering approach: developers move across the stack as needed, gaining proficiency in backend system design, WebRTC integration, and application-level infrastructure."

In the current project, this translates into end-to-end ownership across backend logic, signaling flows, front-end behavior, and overall system reliability.

A Lean Collaboration Structure With Clear Ownership

On this project, Horia is the sole Deviqon engineer, working directly with a three-person technical team on the partner side. Communication is continuous and pragmatic, with most coordination happening in Slack and weekly calls used for structured prioritization. The partner team provides specifications, design drafts, and functional direction, while Horia ensures correct technical execution.

This lean model eliminates overhead and fosters rapid iteration. Because he operates as the primary engineer, ownership is complete: implementing features, validating them, integrating design changes, addressing technical blockers, and maintaining system coherence across components.

Building on WebRTC and LiveKit

The application relies on WebRTC for real-time audio and video, using LiveKit as the basis for media transport, signaling, and session coordination. LiveKit provides a starting point, but the project extends far beyond the demo implementation.

"Most critical functionality - participant state handling, UI event logic, integration with media tracks, browser-side processing - is custom-engineered."

A recent example involved supporting custom images inside video streams. What appears to be a visual enhancement required deeper analysis of how browser memory stores and manipulates bitmap data, how overlays should be composed relative to live video frames, and how these operations interact with encoder pipelines. WebRTC’s real-time constraints added further considerations: frame timing, CPU usage, and performance under varying bandwidth conditions. Implementing such functionality required researching browser APIs, evaluating memory models, prototyping pixel manipulation approaches, and building a production-ready workflow that integrates seamlessly into LiveKit’s track abstraction.

Iterative Prioritization and Weekly Development Cycles

The initial objective of the project was to establish a minimal working conferencing application: media tracks flowing correctly, signaling functioning reliably, and a stable environment for browser interaction. Once that baseline was in place, development became iterative and priority-driven, with new requirements added weekly.

Rather than following a rigid roadmap, the implementation evolves based on feasibility, technical constraints, and usage expectations. Larger features span multiple weeks of research and refinement, while incremental improvements are integrated continuously. This steady cadence ensures predictable progress without compromising system stability or architectural clarity.

Managing Application Infrastructure for Real-Time Communication

Because real-time communication requires consistent media routing and synchronized state management, infrastructure reliability is an essential part of the workflow. The application operates on a cloud-based deployment, and Horia handles tasks such as managing environment configuration, deploying updated builds, monitoring application behavior, and analyzing anomalies.

Troubleshooting in a real-time system is inherently technical:

• Verifying signaling flows
• Checking server-side track distribution
• Evaluating packet loss indicators
• Analyzing logs for session negotiation failures

When unexpected behavior occurs - such as participants failing to join a session—the diagnostic process involves separating front-end logic issues from transport-level behavior and backend state coordination. This interplay between client-side WebRTC implementations, backend signaling logic, and distributed application infrastructure is central to maintaining reliability.

UI Implementation Based on Design Specifications

While UX design is provided by the partner team, implementing the UI within a real-time application context requires careful attention to how visual elements interact with active media streams. Horia ensures that layout logic, component behavior, and state transitions hold up under dynamic runtime conditions - such as participants joining or leaving, toggling audio/video devices, or resizing browser windows.

Testing involves verifying that interface elements remain consistent, responsive, and visually aligned with the design drafts. This step is crucial in WebRTC-based applications, where UI and transport behavior often overlap.

Keeping Up With Emerging Real-Time Media Standards

Beyond daily development, Horia remains actively engaged with emerging technologies in the real-time media space. One of his current interests is Media over QUIC Transport (MOQT), a new protocol being shaped within the IETF ecosystem. He follows draft updates, community discussions, and early implementations - particularly the Rust-based moq-rs project - with the intention of contributing directly. This type of research helps maintain long-term technical relevance and informs how future communication systems might be architected.

Engineering Culture and Team Interaction at Deviqon

Although he operates independently within this project, Horia remains closely connected to the broader Deviqon team. He frequently works from the office, exchanges knowledge informally with colleagues, and occasionally coordinates with internal teams when infrastructure-level insights are needed. This balance - independent engineering responsibility supported by a wider technical community - contributes to both productivity and work satisfaction.

"His perspective is straightforward: the work is serious, technically demanding, and enjoyable, with coding remaining the central motivator."

Conclusion

A day in the life of a Deviqon engineer working on a real-time communication platform integrates software development, protocol-level understanding, infrastructure management, and continuous iteration with partner teams. This collaboration demonstrates how focused engineering ownership, clear technical workflows, and adaptable processes can transform open-source building blocks into a reliable, production-ready communication system.

This approach reflects Deviqon’s broader engineering philosophy: build effectively, understand the technology deeply, and deliver solutions that remain robust as requirements evolve.

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