Async video messages and standups

A standup is a scheduled thing, and scheduled things get retried — the cron fires twice, the deploy restarts mid-create, someone double-clicks. Key the creation on the date so retries return the existing session instead of forking the standup in two. The date is the idempotency key; the name keeps the dashboard readable.

The recording experience should feel like leaving a voice note, not joining a meeting. One participant publishes camera and mic for three minutes and leaves; teammates who are around join live, everyone else does not have to. Because there is no recording to start, there is no host, no waiting room ceremony, and no way to forget the step that mattered.

Verify the way you always do: after the standup, read the manifest and confirm each speaker's cam and mic tracks carry a non-null start_ts. A standup nobody can hear is worse than no standup — it pretends information moved.

Nobody should need an account to watch the standup. createReplayLink mints a URL with its own expiry — a week in the sample above — that plays the session without any credential of yours attached. When the link dies, access dies with it; there is no permission to revoke and no token to rotate.

For viewers inside your product, mint replay tokens instead: same playback, but inside your player, your layout, your access control. Tokens take from_ts and speed, so deep-link the moment that matters and let skimmers watch at double speed.

Resist exporting every standup to a file. Files pile up, cost storage, and freeze one layout forever. Compose in the browser from the separated tracks instead: the layout engine resolves a descriptor — grid for the full team, active-speaker for the update, presenter for the walkthrough — deterministically, so previews and exports always agree.

Standups age fast: last month's are archaeology. Set project retention to cover the useful window — 30 days on Free, up to 90 on Pro — and export an MP4 only for the few worth keeping: the launch walkthrough, the incident review, the decision. Everything else expires on its own, which is also the correct privacy posture for recordings of people's faces.

A standup nobody watches is a standup that stops happening. Subscribe to recording.ready and post the replay link to the team's channel the moment it fires, with the speaker's name and the duration in the message. People click links that arrive; they do not browse archives. The signed webhooks guide shows the subscription and the signature verification this needs.

Keep the notification dumb and the link smart. The message says who recorded and how long it runs; the link carries the expiry and the deep-link to the moment. If a standup regularly runs past five minutes, that is feedback about the standup, and the durations in your notifications are the data that proves it.

The same pattern carries demos and walkthroughs: publish screen alongside camera and mic, and the recording keeps all three on one clock. Viewers get the presenter's face in the corner and the screen large — the active-speaker and screen-share layouts exist for exactly this — and reviewers can jump to the moment in question with windowed playback instead of scrubbing a two-hour file.

Verify screen the same way as everything else: the manifest's screen track with a non-null start_ts is proof the reviewer's most important pixels arrived. For walkthroughs worth keeping past retention, export with the screen-share layout so the file leads with the screen, not the faces.

Standup economics are delightfully predictable. Five people, three minutes, twenty working days: 300 participant-minutes a month, a fifth of the Free allowance, with storage in the low gigabytes — weeks of standups inside 10 GiB. The pattern scales linearly, so the question is never whether it fits but at what headcount it outgrows Free: multiply people by minutes by days and compare with the plan numbers.

The durations are also management data. Median standup length, who records versus who only watches, which days go long — the session list already holds all of it. When standups bloat, show the trend instead of arguing about it.