The chat system we used to have in place here on thefullstack was ChatEngine.io. It was a quick and cheap enough solution to get us up and running. We had tried SendBird and others, but quickly realised it was not worth the expense at this stage, and so we went with ChatEngine. However, we had a lot of stability and UX issues with it, and then later found out the creator of ChatEngine was gonna have to shut down the service and close business. (He has since raised funds and is back in operation).

We went back out looking for a replacement chat solution again. We needed a simple chat solution. Most providers we found were just too high cost (anywhere between $400-$600 dollars per month). Upon reading a great post here from **[@gyanendraknojiya](/gyanendraknojiya)** on reactjs chat application and finding other resources about building on top of Firestore, we decided "well hey, we are devs ourselves", so we built one that satisfied our criteria for right now. It took a full 3 hours to put together - start to finish, and we now had the chatapp replacement. And this time round with zero cost, 10x better stability and full control over UI / UX, etc. with whatever features are needed.

So this project is it.

It's a stripped down version of the chat feature that is implemented here on thefullstack.network. As this is an example repo, I removed any restrictions and encryption rules that are in place on thefullstack chat implementation. I kept this repo simple, so whilst Tailwind is a dependency, this example version doesn't cater for responsiveness or dark mode, etc. Most of which should be straight forward to cover off using Tailwind.

Hope it makes sense. Comment for any suggestions, improvements or connect with me if you want help with it for any of your own projects that need chat functionality.

All credit due to [this tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8YFPPx_BYw) and [this post](https://thefullstack.network/gyanendraknojiya/create-a-real-time-chat-application-using-react-js-and-firebase) from **[@gyanendraknojiya](/gyanendraknojiya)** 

The chat system we used to have in place here on thefullstack was ChatEngine.io. It was a quick and cheap enough solution to get us up and running. We had tried SendBird and others, but quickly realised it was not worth the expense at this stage, and so we went with ChatEngine. However, we had a lot of stability and UX issues with it, and then later found out the creator of ChatEngine was gonna have to shut down the service and close business. (He has since raised funds and is back in operation)

Founder, builder, guitarist

Noel Maher

There are plenty of resources out there to help find ideas and inspiration for projects to build in order to enhance your skills and portfolio. But also lot of people have great ideas (probably sitting on a Trello board or Notion doc somewhere) of things to build and problems to solve. From speaking with many developers, there are tonnes of these amazing (and sometimes innovative) ideas people want to build, need help building or looking for contributors. So wanted to compile a list of all these great ideas (over time) along with great portfolio ideas from other resources already out there to help spark inspiration and collaboration.


### Want to contribute? 🙏

Anyone can contribute to the collection. If you have suggestions or project ideas to add to the list, check out the README or view the **[repo](https://github.com/thefullstackgroup/greatest-developer-portfolio-ever)** and add your project idea to it. It's an extremely simple format to add to the list (I threw this very quickly together), so I would imagine the larger this collection gets, then can change the format.


Hit me up for anyone interested, I'd love (and need) help!

✌️


There are plenty of resources out there to help find ideas and inspiration for projects to build in order to enhance your skills and portfolio. But also lot of people have great ideas (probably sitting on a Trello board or Notion doc somewhere) of things to build and problems to solve. From speaking with many developers, there are tonnes of these amazing (and sometimes innovative) ideas people want to build, need help building or looking for contributors. So wanted to compile a list of all these

This project is about 4 years old. It was one of my first projects where I got back into coding again when I decided to join a startup company in the gambling sector. Over the last 20 years, my career went from Web Developer to Development Manager, to Director of Engineering to CTO. Over those years, (and obviously comes with the roles) I have been managing and scaling engineering teams within a number of different companies, and less and less actual coding. However, I always had an itch to join a smaller company (or start one) and get coding again.

![](https://terrabyte.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/galleries/users/google-oauth2%7C110889799112459409416/profile-google-oauth2%7C110889799112459409416-banach..png)

I joined a gambling startup and this was my first project back coding again. It's a web app built in React, Node for server side and integrated with an API for sports fixtures, results, etc. Considering I was out of the loop somewhat with the latest frontend tech (due somewhat to my roles and where my time had to be spent), I was quite proud of what I released. From starting from scratch to release to production to launch, it was 6 weeks all in. A busy six weeks of learning, debugging, googling, etc. - but I loved it. The app is now used as a demo for B2B selling purposes.


This project is about 4 years old. It was one of my first projects where I got back into coding again when I decided to join a startup company in the gambling sector. Over the last 20 years, my career went from Web Developer to Development Manager, to Director of Engineering to CTO. Over those years, (and obviously comes with the roles) I have been managing and scaling engineering teams within a number of different companies, and less and less actual coding. However, I always had an itch to join

Noel Maher

My tech stack

What I have built