Yapp
A chat platform with voice and video calls that anyone can use.
Yapp is a chat platform I built in August 2026. You create an account, find the people you want to talk to, and chat with them. When text isn’t enough, you start a voice or video call from the same conversation. It is open to anyone, and it’s free.
What it does
- Messaging. Real-time chat with other users, with messages delivered instantly and kept so you can pick a conversation up later.
- Voice calls. Call someone straight from the chat.
- Video calls. The same, with camera.
- Open to anyone. No invite needed. Sign up and start talking.
How it was built
Yapp is a web app, built with Claude Code as my coding tool. The interesting part was not the interface but what sits behind it: user accounts, conversations, message history and call state all have to live somewhere and stay consistent while many people use the app at the same time. That meant designing the data model properly, thinking about what to index, and handling real-time updates without the database becoming the bottleneck. Calls run peer to peer in the browser, with the server only setting them up.
Status
Active. Yapp works and people use it. Some small features are still coming, but nothing big is planned. This is a side project, not the main thing I’m working on.
What I got out of it
This is the project where databases clicked for me. Before Yapp I had mostly used a database as a place to put things. Here I had to think about schema design, relations between users and conversations, what happens when two people write at the same time, and how to keep queries fast as the tables grow. That knowledge carries straight over into the bigger projects I’m working on now.