I took a short break from working on other apps to create a new small app, Chit Chat. This was a nice change of pace from the bigger projects I was working on, as I was able to go from an idea to “done” in less than a week.

The idea of the app is based off cards I found at a thrift store once. Each card had a conversation topic on it. I have already made virtual card decks before, so I already had everything I needed to make a small app that acted like these cards. I went beyond the physical card decks by allowing user suggestions for questions. When users suggest a question, the question is saved but flagged as “hidden” so that I can manually approve submissions (and therefore avoid any bad actors). I get an email when each suggestion is made.

The app consists of an Angular frontend with Bootstrap 4 (which includes Font Awesome) that connects to the same backend most of my apps use: an Express app that talks to a Mongo database.

Beyond adding more questions, I consider this app completed. Three features I considered but didn’t build out were adding more styling, namely animations to make the card drawing more like actually drawing a card, getting daily or weekly emails with suggestions, and having a twitter account automatically tweet out a random question once per day. I may return to this app at some point to build those out, as they all cover things I don’t have much experience with: advanced styling / animations and timed jobs. That shows how small projects like this help me, I will be able to practice new ideas with this app without disrupting a more complicated project.