It’s my party and I’ll build my own virtual social platform if I want to! by Sara Farquharson What to do when you want to throw a huge birthday party when travel and parties aren’t possible? Try (and maybe fail!) to build your own video conferencing platform, of course! At least, that seemed like the obvious solution a few months before my own birthday. There are many ways to interact with friends online, but none I could find captured the feeling of socializing with a large group of friends in a physical space. It seems that if I wanted to host the party I imagined, I would have to build a platform myself! Join me on my adventure of exploring: what puts the “social” in “virtual social space” anyway? How do you design the perfect distributed party? And is it possible to learn enough about WebRTC, audio spatialization, and scalable cloud infrastructure to build it in under two months, with no prior experience? Along the way I’ll talk about some of the technical challenges of building video conferencing software I discovered, which helped me understand why my dream platform didn’t already exist. Sara is a lifelong generalist who enjoys writing code, aerial silks, and talking enthusiastically about her myriad of other interests. Previous short-notice projects she has thrown together for her birthday include: learn to scuba dive, perform a cello concert on a cruise ship, and put on a guest-filled charity fundraiser livestream.