Nirah

Overview

Nirah is a real time chat application I built as a proof of concept, mostly to figure out how apps like Discord work under the hood and how websockets keep a live connection open. It was one of my first personal projects.

Highlights

• A persistent friends system for adding and keeping track of the people you talk to.
• Live chat history within each room, so the whole conversation is there while it is happening.
• Ephemeral rooms that clean themselves up once no one has been in them for a while, so nothing lingers, which keeps things private by default.

Under the hood

The whole thing runs on websockets so messages move between the clients and the server in real time. Almost nothing is meant to stick around: your friends list is the one part that persists, while rooms and their history are ephemeral and get torn down once a room sits empty, so conversations do not outlast the people having them.