Not long ago I was shopping around for potential chat solutions for an app I wanted to develop, and I came across this project.<p>On the surface, the user-interface is not very polished. I'm not sure if this is intended to be an implementation detail of the consumer of this solution, bring-your-own-frontend style, or otherwise.<p>Additionally, the dependencies sound heavy. Express, Jade; PostgreSQL, Redis; socket.io, jQuery... Of course these are answers to real problems—api, views, persistent storage, a message cache, communication layer, a view layer. But the chances of me building anything on top of this or embedding it in another application are tiny because it already brings so much to the table.
"Miaou" is the french word for "Meow", and "chat" in french means "cat".<p>(Not a big surprise, the developer is from Lyon, France)
When I see tons of similar projects pop up in a short time period (such as chat applications recently), I am feeling kind of divided.<p>On one hand, it's cool, someone spent their time and actually shipped something. That's great, really.<p>But on other hand, all the hard work could be utilized so much better if a few people joined their efforts to produce one great product rather than a few less polished ones. Is it that people prefer to work alone? Or is it just too hard to join an existing project (e.g. lack of docs, build procedure and general workflow is too inconvenient)? Or maybe it's too hard to find a project that you'd love to join?<p>It's not something aimed personal at the OP, really no, just a though I am having when I see similar things.