It started with a tweet.
I posted a short demo of a desktop app I built for fun, a little game clip recorder called Playshot.tv. I listed the tech stack, showed it working, and hit post. I never mentioned Medal. Not once.
Then a comment came in from Joshua Lipson, co-founder and former CTO of Medal.tv. He told me, publicly, that I should join the team.
I was shocked. I built a clip recorder without ever naming the biggest clip company in the world, and somehow the post still landed right in front of the guy who built it. Crazy how the internet works.
Why I built Playshot
Two reasons.
First, I needed an excuse to give my wife, because she always catches me playing games after work hours 😂
Second, the real one: Medal felt a bit heavy on my PC. I would notice FPS drops while playing, especially with the recorder quality set to high. So I thought, how fun would it be to build a mini replica? Initially I only wanted to build the recorder itself. I did not care about the interface at all.
I got carried away. I ended up building the whole app.
The wall
I went in knowing nothing about how recorders actually work. Encoders, capture pipelines, GPU behavior, all of it was new to me. I learned by reading how the best tools are built, and honestly, working with an AI agent made the learning curve much smoother than I expected. I rarely hit a blocker that made me want to stop.
That does not mean it was easy.
One blocker ate an entire week of my life: GPU contention. My recordings stuttered on heavy games and I could not figure out why. I rewrote things, refactored, threw code at the problem. The final fix? Registering the app properly in the GPU whitelist through the registry, so the scheduler stopped treating my recorder like a background nobody.
A week of suffering, solved by a few lines. I deleted thousands of lines of code and replaced them with something embarrassingly simple. I laughed out loud when it worked. If you have been an engineer long enough, you know exactly this feeling.
The conversations
After Josh’s comment, we got to talking, and he was refreshingly honest about how Medal’s codebase grew in the early days: shipped fast, messy in places, and used by millions of gamers anyway.
That stuck with me. As engineers, we love making everything look perfect before validating anything, before shipping anything. Meanwhile, the products that win are the ones that reach real users first. Not many engineers have the guts to work that way.
Then came the interview process with the team. On paper it was a series of rounds. In practice, every single one felt like a casual discussion with a future coworker. They asked about my motivation for building Playshot, and yes, I gave them both answers, including the one about my wife.
What’s next
I’m joining Medal.tv as a Frontend Engineer.
And here is the part I love: I’m joining right in the middle of a big optimization and revamping effort. The exact thing that made me build Playshot in the first place, that heavy feeling while gaming, is now literally my job to help fix. Full circle.
I’ll be remote for the first few months, then moving on-site to New York. Which leads to the part of this story I have not told yet.
From Batu Bara to NYC
Since 2020 I have been living and working from Kabupaten Batu Bara, a small town in North Sumatra, Indonesia. If you search for it, you will not find much. What I can tell you: the power goes out around five times a week, and the internet has never been something I could rely on.
Every job I have ever had was remote, because that was the only option from where I live. I have spent my whole career wondering what I could do with a stable environment, a real office, a team in the same room. In a few months, I finally get to find out.
The hardest part is not the move. It is that I will be leaving my wife and kids behind for a while, probably around a year, until everything is established and our youngest is a little older. Then I bring them over, to NYC or somewhere near it. That is the deal I made, and it is the heaviest and most motivating part of this whole journey.
About Playshot
Playshot stays available. It started as my excuse to play games, became my education in how recorders work, and got me a job at the company I was quietly replicating. Now it becomes my research playground, the place where I keep learning.
Thank you to Josh for one life-changing comment, to Yiyi Zhang for making the whole process feel human, and to my wife for pretending to believe the excuse.
Build things. Post them. You genuinely never know who is watching.