couples therapy chat
As part of a more general initiative to take ownership of my data by hosting it myself, I cobbled together a chat app. My target audience is limited to me and my wife mostly discussing logistics. A fancy way of saying we needed a better way to coordinate grocery lists and who picks up the kids.
There are plenty of chat apps out there, but I wanted something that was self-hosted, lightweight, and didn't require a PhD in DevOps to set up. After some experimentation, I landed on a simple AJAX-based chat that runs on PHP and stores messages in a flat file. No database required.
The interface is intentionally minimal - just a login, a message window, and an input field. It supports multiple channels, though we mostly stick to a single "general" channel for household coordination. The whole thing is themed to match the rest of the site.
It's not going to replace Slack or Discord, but it works for our needs and I learned a lot building it. Plus, there's something satisfying about using a tool you built yourself, even if it's just for chatting about whose turn it is to take out the trash.