KGBaby (2/N)

Following on from my previous post, I took KGBaby on the road to our weekend vacation rental—shoutout to Honge on the Rocks. And it failed. Spectacularly.

I was, of course, very excited to try it out in the "real world." I had expected some hiccups, but not a complete failure. Given that it was a weekend vacation, I did not spend much time debugging or improving it. Once I came back, I was at it with a vengeance. After some digging around, I found what I believe was the issue and implemented a solution. KGBaby worked flawlessly on my home Deco mesh but failed on a random Airbnb Wi-Fi, even with both devices on the same network.

The root cause was probably network policy, whereby direct WebRTC couldn't establish a reliable peer-to-peer path. I added TURN relay fallback but compromised privacy in the process. We live to try another day!

What I learnt: You build a better product by testing and breaking it.