wekkit / htht-chat

Real time chat app with multiple channels, using Node/Express, socket.io and ReactJS

HTHT chat

HTHT chat is a live chat app that allows people to chat according to their topics of interest at the moment. If our moods fluctuate as much as we try to deny it, why shouldn't our public chatrooms cater to that? HTHT stands for heart to heart talk, and I built it as my 2nd project at General Assembly as a web development student.

At any point in time there can be tens or hundreds of chat rooms, but you can only belong to one. Each room has a 5 people limit to ensure a personal and meaningful experience.

Live demo here

Features

HTHT chat has the following features:

• Listing of current topics being discussed
• Multiple live chat rooms enabled by socket.io technology
• Ability to join a room without registration
• Automatic size limit of 5 people in each room to encourage focused discussion

Technology stack

HTHT chat is built with Facebook's React.js for blazing fast DOM re-rendering and socket.io web sockets.

Development process

We were tasked to hack a real-time app that uses web socket technology and had roughly 3 days to complete it.

The HTHT chat concept had always lurked in my mind: a web app that instantly connects me with someone who is thinking about something that I'm also thinking about at the moment. During a particularly long streak of daily morning meditation (like 15 days or so), I started to notice the incongruence of thoughts that I had from day to day. One day I'd be feeling melancholic and asking existential questions and on a different day I'd find myself wondering about the surest way to preventing mid-life crisis, if it still exists in 2016. Surely someone else in the world is also entertaining these thoughts right now?

Building HTHT chat was very interesting for two reasons:

1. Web socket is a specific tool that opens many doors in terms of feature possibilities
2. It works surprisingly well with React.js, Facebook's modern single-page app framework