Terminal Chat
This is a very simple, terminal-inspired messaging app that allows users to send messages, create groups, and manage contacts. It features a clean UI with a focus on functionality, including profanity filters to ensure a safe messaging environment. The app is built with React and Vite for a modern development experience. Users can easily navigate through conversations and manage their contacts on both desktop and mobile screens.
Intent of the Website
Terminal Chat is meant to be a simple messaging app that allows its users to communicate in a terminal-inspired environment. It is not meant to be a full-fledged messaging app, but rather a showcase of my skills in building a messaging app with a deployed front-end, back-end, and database.
Technical Overview
This messaging app is built with React and Vite, providing a modern and fast development experience. The use of Node.js allows for a robust back-end, while Postgres ensures reliable data storage and retrieval. The profanity filters use a 'bad words' list to help maintain a safe messaging environment, enhancing user experience. The terminal-inspired UI is designed to be clean and functional, allowing users to easily navigate through conversations and manage their contacts. The app is responsive, ensuring a seamless experience on both desktop and mobile devices. The group chat feature allows users to create and manage groups, making it easy to communicate with multiple people at once about a focused topic. Supertest was used to test the API endpoints, ensuring that the app is reliable and performs well under various conditions.
Challenges Faced
The database relationships were a challenge, as users can have different types of contacts and ways of communicating with them. People can message friends and non-friends, so keeping things separate was essential. Groups brought in another layer of complexity, as users can be in multiple groups and groups can have multiple users. Navigating these many-to-many relationships required an intermediary table to track the relationships between users and their groups. The first message on the app proved that it could benefit from a profanity filter. Implementing the profanity filters was fairly easy. It is just a package that compares words in messages to a list of restricted words. There were other solutions that were considered, but the restricted list was chosen for its simplicity.
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Want to Collaborate?
I'm always interested in new opportunities and collaborations. Check me out at one of the links below, or drop me a message and let's discuss how we can work together!