Introducing Terminal-Chat-App: Chat, Create, and Join Public Chat Rooms from the Command Line

What I built

The Terminal Chat App is a command-line chat application that allows users to join public chat rooms and chat from the command-line interface. Users can also create new chat rooms and interact with other users in real-time

Category Submission: Wacky Wildcards

App Link

https://www.npmjs.com/package/tarminal-chat-app

Screenshots

Video demo

https://youtu.be/GfpvChlPq3g

Description

Features:
Command-line interface
Join public chat rooms
Create public chat rooms
Chat in real-time
User authentication

Link to Source Code

https://github.com/HayatsCodes/terminal-chat-app

Permissive License

MIT

Background (What made you decide to build this particular app? What inspired you?)

As a software engineer looking for my first job, I wanted to be challenged and get out of my comfort zone by building a novel real-life project. I actually had the idea before the hackathon but procrastinated. However, the hackathon refueled me to build the project.

How I built it (How did you utilize GitHub Actions or GitHub Codespaces? Did you learn something new along the way? Pick up a new skill?)

I'd never heard of GitHub codespaces before the hackathon, and I got to find out what I'd been missing all along. It was at least 3X faster than my normal local workspace because of the dedicated virtual machines of up to 32 cores (I used the 2-core machine, and it was still significantly faster than my machine). I loved the fact that I used the default Linux image and didn't need to configure the workspace to get stuff done. I was so excited about GitHub codespaces that I posted about it on LinkedIn and also wrote an article about it on DEV. It was fun building on GitHub codespaces and I'm glad to have discovered it through this hackathon. I only used GitHub actions to automate the server's API test.

Additional Resources/Info

The server was deployed to railway.app while the user interface was published on the NPM registry.

Blog