What was the problem?
I recently had dinner with an old friend from high school. We talked about the videos we used to make for our class presentations, and how fun that was. Neither of us knew if those videos still existed.
What was the idea?
I was pretty sure I had them somewhere, in a Google Drive or on an old PC at my parents’ house. If I found them, I wanted to make a time capsule for my friends: a place to revisit those videos, in the kind of digital world we had back then.
What did I build?
I built a website that looks like Windows 7, the system on the computers we used in our high school’s computer labs. A website, so my friends could open it from a link on a computer or a phone, with nothing to install. To find the videos, I first indexed my old backups, with transcripts of every video. The site is plain JavaScript with no framework, on a Cloudflare Worker. Each friend gets their own invite link, so I don’t need their emails first. They sign in with a code sent by email. The videos stream from R2 and stay on the site. A private admin page shows me what my friends watched.
Tandem. When a friend visits: the browser asks the Worker at tandem.victorc.dev to sign in, the Worker checks the guest list in KV and sends a 6-digit code with Cloudflare Email, then serves the site and streams the videos from R2. What each friend opens is saved in D1, for my admin page. Preparing the media, once: on my Mac mini, I indexed my old backups with video transcripts, found the projects, converted them and uploaded them to R2.
What happened?
It went live on October 6, 2026. I’m sending the invite links one friend at a time, starting with one friend.