WritingsEngineering2026
How ChatMe keeps conversations reliable in realtime
Accounts, presence, ordered delivery and media on one messaging path — and a client that stays in sync when the network is busy.
ChatMe is the working example behind this note: people can sign in, talk, see who is around, get receipts and send media.
The hard part is the network path. The server is a custom async WebSocket stack in C++ (Boost.Asio and Boost.Beast). Sessions, framing and lifecycle stay under control. Ordered delivery and concurrency are handled so parallel requests do not scramble the conversation.
Database work runs on worker threads so sockets stay responsive. The web client reconciles optimistic sends with server acknowledgements. An Android build via Capacitor covers the same product on mobile. Deployment is Linux with nginx and systemd.
Links below are the live example and the source.