Snek

Snek is a chat application intended to replace Rocket.Chat.

It's designed to be fast, performant, and easy to use. The installation is just a few minutes of example. Zero configuration.

It's also open source and you can find the source code here . If you would like to collaborate, to make the project even better, that would be great.

Features

Anonymous registration, email is optional
Automatically generated avatar
PWA, it works very well on mobile devices. Also, when chrome is installed, it will be installed as a PWA.
Private messaging
Group messaging
File sharing
Image sharing
Video sharing
Audio sharing
Syntax highlighting for code snippets with support for many languages.
Markdown support

Every user has an automatically assigned avatar. For now, this is impossible to change. There are 12.000.000.000 avatars available. That you can't choose your avatar has something funny. Snek is designed for anonymous use anyway, what's the point of customizing it. You have to live with your avatar. They're automatically generated thus it's possible to be woman with a mustache. We've seen many funny avatars.

Technologies used

python - the backend
aiohttp - asyncio web framework. Basically my router.
dataset - sqlite3 to documentdb wrapper
pygments - for syntax highlighting
sqlite3 - file based database
jinja2 - for templating
html - the frontend
vanilla javascript - the frontend
css - the frontend
docker (optional) - for deployment

The ORM and all form validation is written by myself. It was a good decision. All data is validated on model level before entering the database. Also, the frontend is vanilla javascript and thus great performance. The javascript is just inline since this project consists about several backend rendered pages with their own functionality.