The Story of Plaudere: From Concept to a Working Website

This is the story of how Plaudere was imagined and built. It is a story that started a long time ago, long before the first line of code of the site was ever written.

I clearly remember the first time I visited a website in my high school's computer lab. It was in the late 1990s. I used a search engine called Altavista combined with Microsoft Encarta, which was the main source of information for high school students at that time. In those early days, the internet was very simple, and I never thought that one day I would build a website myself.

Later, at university in the early 2000s, an introductory computer software course taught me some basic HTML. This was the time of Web 2.0, which introduced social networks like Hi5 and the first version of Facebook.

Another early web development experience for me came during a project on industrial manufacturing as part of my industrial engineering degree. We had to simulate a website to control machines in a factory. Using Visual Basic (VB), I created a simple browser with two pages to show that it was possible to use a website for an industrial process. However, even then, I had not built a proper website that could be accessed by others.

Time went on. In the late 2000s, YouTube and Facebook became very popular, and most of my friends used Messenger to chat. Mobile phones also slowly started to get internet access. Still, the idea of developing a website for myself was not in my mind.

The First Steps in Web Development

During a professional experience in a procurement department, the team used a static web server to run an intranet. This was a private website for the company's employees where documents, links, and guides were available to support our daily tasks. In the early 2010s, I became responsible for this intranet. Without knowing any HTML, I found myself looking at the code. It was not clear at all, but I started to see patterns, texts, and links. With some creativity, I was able to change the website completely, making it more modern and adding useful sections for the buyers. However, my main programming tools at that time were MySQL (a database system) and Visual Basic, along with some Excel macros. Web development was still not a key skill for me.

However, this experience, combined with my love for music, led to a new idea. From time to time, I would get together with musician friends to practice, write, and record music. When I started a project management course and advanced English classes, I felt a strong need to find a solution to play music with my friends online. At that time in the early 2010s, there were some tools that allowed musicians to play together, including websites and desktop programs. But there were problems like a delay between streams, a need for a high internet speed (bandwidth), and user interfaces that were difficult to use, with complicated settings to configure. Because of these issues, my friends and I were not able to collaborate online. In addition, it became difficult for me to play live with them due to my increasing work responsibilities.

I researched the state of web development at that time and found it quite challenging, especially because scripting languages such as HTML and CSS were still fairly new to me. A colleague told me to learn PHP (a scripting language) along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using w3schools, a great online platform. But because of some big changes in my life, learning to code became less important for my career and I put it aside.

From MBA to the Birth of an Idea

The 2010s were a decade where I focused on my professional growth. I completed my MBA and started my career in Europe; however, I did not feel a strong need to learn web coding until a conversation with a musician friend. He said, "Hey, when can we play together online? If there is no tool to do it, maybe you can build your own." This was a very inspiring moment in the late 2010s. While exploring different options, I realised that a desktop application would not be as easy to use and share as a website. So, I decided to start learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I began with programming books from the library and then took online courses to learn the key ideas.

At first, it was difficult to learn how to build websites. But during the pandemic, the lockdown gave me time to think about this crazy idea of helping musicians play together online. This motivated me to start developing "Plaudere", which is a Latin word meaning "to applaud and approve", connected with the idea of sharing a performance with an audience and having them applaud after the show.

Developing Plaudere: The Prototypes

From early 2020 to 2025, I created four different prototypes while working on the idea for Plaudere. At the beginning, Plaudere was more focused on live streaming. I planned to use open libraries and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) like MySQL for the database, Node.js and Express for the server side (backend), and APIs like the Web Audio API, Media Recorder API, and Web Socket API to capture and send a stream in small parts to the audience. The first two prototypes were SPAs (Single Page Applications), which I believed would make it easier to manage the entire streaming session. However, they turned out to be more complex. A single page requires managing the user interface through JavaScript, which left less capacity for handling media content such as audio and video.

The next prototypes used a more traditional website with multiple pages managed by an Express router and controller in Node.js. It used cookies to remember the session, a login with Google or Microsoft, a database (this time using MongoDB), and a background worker to do calculations. Even though I hosted it on Google Cloud using Google App Engine, I later preferred a specific hosting service called Railway. Finally, I launched the domain "Plaudere.com," and this is how the fourth prototype is moving forward.

Challenges and My Approach

Of course, from the first to the fourth prototype, I had to spend a lot of my personal time to understand problems, issues, and find solutions. I can mention a few challenges. For example, an SPA, if not managed well, can make the website slow. The server-side JavaScript code using Node.js and the Express framework is very open, which can lead to inefficient programming. In later prototypes, I started to create reusable parts of the code to avoid repeating myself. I made the server prepare the HTML pages as much as possible to reduce the work for the client-side JavaScript.

I know that using web frameworks like Bootstrap (for the look of the website) or React and Next.js would have made my life easier. These frameworks help build websites with fewer steps but have a more complex structure, as they need a compiler and can slow down the website because of pre-loaded libraries. I looked at what is used for web development today, and I decided to build the website on my own using pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the frontend and Node.js and Express for the backend. My main goal was to learn the basics of web development and to control the website with as few libraries and external tools as possible. This is a difficult goal to reach today, but this exercise helped me decide if a library or a third-party API was really needed or if I could do it with some extra JavaScript. In the future, I plan to use more modern tools, but step by step, this is a starting prototype, and it will only use more advanced solutions if needed to improve the experience.

The streaming tests also taught me many lessons. For a shared streaming session, the website's interface and background tasks must be flexible enough for different streamers. However, adding features like a "ladder" to join another stream in real-time was very difficult. I included it in the first three prototypes but removed it from the fourth one. I decided to focus on building a stronger foundation for sending and receiving streams and avoiding errors when switching between streamers. I also added the ability to combine the stream with video from a camera or a video file, which gives the streamer more options. I am sure that in future versions, I will look again at the streaming technology to expand the functionality and make the stream feel more like a theatre show than a simple stream through a website.

Conclusion

In this post, you have been able to understand the ideas and the work behind Plaudere. I am very happy with this fourth website prototype, which has changed the concept of a simple live-streaming website. This website can now be described as a mix of a blog and a streaming platform, allowing people to create spaces and posts, and use those spaces to interact with an audience through a live show, with more and more features coming soon.

Let us see what is next for Plaudere. I hope this post has helped you understand the idea and the first steps of its development.

Joe Esteves