Turning coworkers’ faces into Slack emoji

The whole thing lived or died on the pipeline. Slack gives an emoji 128 pixels and a tight file-size cap, and most of the time it renders at about the size of this word — so every clip had to read at a glance. The rhythm was: film a colleague for a few seconds, crop to a square, cut the loop down to about a second, and compress until Slack stopped rejecting the upload.

Compression was the fight. A one-second loop of a real face turns to mush fast, and my first exports came out as smeared thumbnails. Trimming frames and pushing contrast saved most of them; a few clips never survived the squeeze, and they’re not on this page.

The best part was watching them escape the hackathon. People started reacting to real messages with their coworkers’ faces within the hour, and colleagues I hadn’t filmed came asking to be added — the only adoption signal I’ve ever fully trusted.

The CEO asked me to demo it live; I was already on the train home, so a teammate presented in my place. It’s still the wildest hack I’ve done — thanks to the teammate who pitched the idea, and the one who stood up and demoed it for me.