This week has been full of planning and project discussions for Team 5. From last week, you may remember that we were having a bit of trouble working with Jitsi, primarily in getting any of our code to connect to our local instance of Jitsi on Docker. The good news is that we’ve managed to pretty much fix all of those issues! The main problem was that we needed an HTTPS connection, which requires an SSL certificate and thus a domain name. Our workaround for that was using port forwarding with ngrok, but this didn’t really work out too well, so we’ve instead set up Jitsi on an AWS EC2 instance. You can access it at https://ippd-jitsi.com (but don’t use it too much! It only has 1 CPU and 1 GiB of RAM so it may crash).

Because of this, along with some scope changes suggested by our liaison engineers, we’ve decided to try modifying the source code of Jitsi Meet for the UI, rather than building it from scratch using just lib-jitsi-meet. This makes almost all of our previous code unusable now, but it’s alright — at least now we have something structured to build off of.

We also had our PDR presentation with our liaison engineers in person this week! Overall, it went fairly smoothly, though we had several suggestions from both Sriram and Jake for how to improve the clarity of the presentation. We also managed to somewhat convince them that our project pivot was a viable direction to go in, so hopefully over the next few weeks we’ll be able to follow through with our promises.

In the next few days, we’ll be diving into the Jitsi Meet repo to fully understand its structure and build new components specific to our application. It’s a fairly large codebase, which makes it a little bit intimidating, but with the help of Jitsi’s community and our friendly AI assistant, we have the tools we need to make this work.