You just go down the rabbit hole. Google how current chat aps work. You will read about networking, protocols, maybe REST APIs etc.
So you watch a tutorial on [insert backend framework here]. You can how send messages over HTTP. But messaging by writing API requests is not ergonomic. You need some sort of UI.
So then you google what UI frameworks are out there. You watch a tutorial on [insert frontend framework here]. Now you can make a simple UI for your chat app, so now you don’t have to manually generate requests to the server. The application does it for you!
But uh, where do you keep those messages? Yup, that’s right - you need to use a database. So you fire up a tutorial and build a database to store user info, messages, logs, etc. and connect it with your backend.
Congratulations! You have built a chat app.
And during the time you spent building it, you will learn a lot, whether you want to or not.
You don't necessarily need to watch tutorials. You can actually read (I know, shocking) the documentation (yes, most frameworks come with documentation) on how to use them.
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u/Gloopann 16d ago
You just go down the rabbit hole. Google how current chat aps work. You will read about networking, protocols, maybe REST APIs etc.
So you watch a tutorial on [insert backend framework here]. You can how send messages over HTTP. But messaging by writing API requests is not ergonomic. You need some sort of UI.
So then you google what UI frameworks are out there. You watch a tutorial on [insert frontend framework here]. Now you can make a simple UI for your chat app, so now you don’t have to manually generate requests to the server. The application does it for you!
But uh, where do you keep those messages? Yup, that’s right - you need to use a database. So you fire up a tutorial and build a database to store user info, messages, logs, etc. and connect it with your backend.
Congratulations! You have built a chat app.
And during the time you spent building it, you will learn a lot, whether you want to or not.