Behind the Scenes: Building Loom for Desktop

This post details the engineering decisions and challenges in building the Loom desktop client. Key contributions include: 1. Choosing Electron for cross-platform UI development while leveraging native recording layers. 2. Designing a scalable windowing system with independent windows for UI components, managed by a centralized middleware to ensure maintainable code locality and extensibility. 3. Redesigning the video infrastructure to move 4K video processing (transmuxing and HLS conversion) from servers to the client, enabling immediate streaming and improved reliability by segmenting recordings into HLS playlists.