I made a thing, it’s called JumpInChat

So the last few years I’ve been working on a personal project of mine, which I eventually called JumpInChat(https://jumpin.chat) — because you jump in… and chat? Anyway, It’s a site where you create chat rooms, complete with video, that you can either make on the fly or set up an account which can be customized. It’s something that I’ve been working on over the last couple of years or so, which started as an experiment but inevitably grew into something quite significant.

It’s similar to something I’ve used before, which was an idea that I’m quite fond of, and a lot of good friends were made and fun times were had over the years I used it. So making something new, and hopefully better, that is modern and suited for the future felt like a worthy task. It has been something that’s consumed many weekends, countless evenings and much of my sanity but right about now I’m considering the MVP, or minimum viable product, in workable condition. Essentially the basic concept of the whole thing is in place, and functions to a reasonable extent. Right now, it requires testing, which means people using it to break stuff that I can’t. So giving it a go and having a mess around is something I’d quite appreciate.

So aside from this being a de-facto, albeit small, launch event it’s the first attempt at starting some kind of journal. Hopefully it will help to explain just what the heck I’m doing, and plan to do, with JumpInChat. It’ll be for showing you all the plans for the future, goals I indent to achieve, updates to stuff that are worth mentioning and probably just general rambling.

So about goals

So I mentioned MVP is about there. My immediate concern now is to make it work as well as possible, fixing all the broken things that I made one late night/morning without really thinking it through, and generally making the whole experience less terrible. How long this lasts depends partly on how much my test subjects, or users if you will, manage to break. However it’s also an opportunity to evaluate some of the ideas and preconceptions I’ve had while creating this, and having some real people use it will allow me the opportunity to improve what is planned for the future.

Over time I’ll start shifting my focus towards making everything more robust behind the scenes, namely the servers I’m using, so that more than a few people can use the site without it falling apart. Mainly this involves adding more servers, and making them function more efficiently, along with making things more automated so I can stop worrying about everything all the time. The hope is that this will set me up to support a decent userbase during the early days of this thing being live.

Later goals are geared towards a proper ‘live’ release, as in actually marketing it a bit, and adding more feature rich stuff. It’ll also involve more ‘business’ stuff so I can properly cover my ass in the event anything goes wrong. This is all up in the air right now though, and subject to change.

Currently I’m working a few hours each morning on this, so progress will be slow and very much subject to priorities. This means I have to pick and choose rather carefully what to work on, so all the fancy things you want may not be added in a timely fashion. Though please remember that this is something that has been worked on for some time, and I have no intentions to stop any time soon.

Anyway, stay tuned to where ever I spam these posts for more updates.