Virtual Watercooler

• 

• 

  See who answers what trivia question in realtime

• 

Inspiration

Shortly after COVID started to spread throughout the United States the employer I work for wisely asked everyone at the office to work from home until they could be sure we were safe. On our last day in the office they held a quick training session with tips and guidelines on how to work from home. There was one piece of information during that presentation that I had found odd & surprising - that the second most common challenge remote workers report is: loneliness.

After a few days self quarantine I quickly started to understand why loneliness was ranked so highly as a remote work challenge. Being a software engineer, my mind immediately went to what I could build to solve my problem, and hopefully, the problem of many other recently remote workers who were finding themselves struggling with this new world of isolation.

I created Virtual Watercooler to be a place where you can easily hop into a video chat and participate in fun and interactive activities with friends or coworkers. The first such activity I've built so far is simple, and yet ubiquitous, trivia!

What it does

Virtual Watercooler is a video chat application that has integrated and interactive community activities.

How I built it

For the video portion I am relying on Twilio's video service, the backend is NodeJS / GraphQL and the frontend is React.

Challenges I ran into

Keeping a trivia game in perfect sync across many different sessions was a fun challenge!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Well, it works - and I've been able to have some good laughs and fun rounds of trivia with friends, coworkers, and family.

What's next for Virtual Watercooler

I'd like to distribute this to as many companies as I can - as quickly as I can - to help bolster culture and community during this time of fear, loneliness, and uncertainty.

Built With

• graphql
• hasura
• node.js
• react
• twilio
• websockets