• Build the back-end for the messaging application
• You will need:
  • a way to store conversations and messages
  • an API call to get all conversations for a user
  • an API call to get all messages for a conversation (ordered in a way that makes sense)
  • an API to search for users to find them to talk to

Build and replicate the front-end of the application

• Add socket support on the front-end and back-end so that the messages are real-time
• use this package socket.io for real-time notifications
• Setup socket server on the backend
• Setup client connection (should connect if the user is authed, add some layer of security would be best)
• If you are planning on doing online statuses, we also want an object to keep track of which users are currently connected - for simplicity, you can for now just use an in-memory variable (like a dictionary or object in the back-end - not recommended for scalability, but it works for this project)

• Create a Register route (POST)
  • this will create a new user, return 201
  • validation on the back-end - password should be atleast 6 characters, required fields (email, name)
  • simple password validation (>6 chars)
• Create a Login route (POST)
  • verify username and password
  • return 4xx if things are incorrect
• User model, don't want to save password directly on the database (hash/salt before we save them)
• Add an auth middleware / decorator - we can easily create authenticated routes and get the user object
• Try to use a decent authentication strategy something like using HTTP only cookies or localstorage

• create two front-end react routers (login and signup)
• There is no landing page - redirect to signup
• Signup page - name, email, password + confirm password
• Ignore Forget password (we don't need that right now)
• Front-end validation as well:
  • Examples: Password length >= 6, All fields are required, email is properly formatted (if you wrap signup and login in an HTML form, you can leverage some front-end HTML form validation, required and right typing)
  • leverage error, helperText, and snackbars (material-ui) for showing validation errors, https://material-ui.com/components/snackbars/ + https://material-ui.com/components/text-fields/

Stretch Goal: make this page responsive by remove any side images on smaller screens

• Connect to a database technology on start of your application (please only select one technology, try to choose something that is a good fit for your project if possible, or something you are comfortable with using)
• Create a very basic user model that will be needed for login / signup of the application
• Update the Readme of the application to include some instructions on how to run the application with the db locally

Here are some resources on the technologies:

• Postgres - use SQLAlchemy if you are using Flask/Python and use Sequelize if you are using Node.js/Express
• MongoDB - use Mongoose for Node.js or PyMongo + some object document mapper to make things organized