TalkIt

logo
main interface
email invite
drone pipeline
drone
GCP project
cloudflare

Inspiration

drive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YeYEvG_DO3niBwwTvHExlRSiSWRzTdE9?usp=sharing video link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ovKsRLa2a-tg_d7M1ERwFdO7CQ7SltHt/view?usp=sharing

Hackathon is a very good experience where we managed to learn many different things, developing a whole new product from scratch, learning a new technology stack like redis. Using rapid prototyping. Our product was inspired by many famous chat platform like discord, slack, whatsapp etc. We took the concepts of multiuser chats and group from slack and whatsapp. Whatsapp simple design and slack's user flows were inspiring too.

What it does

It is a multi user chat platform with a very simple UI that lets you create channels and invite people on the platform to join them to indulge in communication via text. From the challenge we were able to includes features like create account via email, real time chat with users, creating channels, joining channels, viewing user profile.

How we built it

Like every project it all started with brainstorming and jotting down all the features that should be in such a system. These features were prioritized based on the time limit and expertise. Due to diverse skills in out team features were turned in to user stories that were distributed among the team and worked in parallel. We adopted the microservice architecture and deployed it on google cloud using docker on local system and kubernetes on cloud. Agile practices were followed. The tech stack is specific and performing. We used redis for majority of data storing and retrieval and also used redis pub/sub for interservice communication.

Challenges we ran into

Time constraint was one of the major hurdle and managing redis in multiple intentions like data stream, database and implementing a two way UI theme (dark and light). We had an initial trouble of understanding the streams fro redis but it all got sorted. Implementing websocket for real chat were a bit trouble some.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We not only designed a very charismatic UI from scratch but also deployed it over a cloud native micro-service architecture which is live in production ready environment. We implemented most of the recommend functionality that were core to a solution like this. Were able to integrate chats in the UI and also created almost all of the figma screens in react.

What we learned

How to work in a pressurized environment while always thinking about a better solution that other might think of. How to use new technologies like redis and collaborate in a remote fashion for this time constraint event.

What's next for TalkIt

We have developed a whole business development strategy where we can develop this chat as a redis sdk used as a chat application module, and further developing this into a whole new platform where we can offer different webhooks to integrate different application