How I Quit My Job and Wrote a Messenger That Became a Meme on Social Network X

Background

In September 2022, I entered my fourth year of university. I had been freelancing since my school days and at some point I started earning good money. However, in March 2022, Upwork left Russia and my freelancing career went down the drain. Then I decided to start working for a company and after some time searching, I found a suitable job. Everything was going well, I liked working there, but at the same time I had to study at university. At some point, I started to burn out due to enormous stress and almost complete lack of rest. The culmination of my burnout was that I didn’t go to graduation because I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning due to fatigue. My productivity at work dropped, but I had a couple of weeks left before my vacation, and when I went on it, I finally exhaled. I was sure that my productivity would return to its previous level, but, alas, over time everything only got worse. At one point we had to say goodbye, and I was happy. I went on a trip for two weeks and was going to look for a new job upon arrival, but the search was very slow and I only had one interview in a month.

Start of development

By mid-December, I decided that looking for a job at the moment was a lost cause, and I should spend this time learning something new. I decided to learn WebSocket, since there were many vacancies where this technology was mentioned. I started making an interface in React, but at some point I decided that if I were to learn something new, then I would learn it to the fullest extent, and began learning Angular. I will not delve into the technical aspects, I will just say that the messenger was written on the MEAN stack. Thanks to this project, I learned WebSocket, Angular, Express, CI/CD and Nginx.

Launch and reaction

After 2.5 months of development, on February 25th I opened registration for users and posted it on Twitter. People started registering right away, and I didn't expect such interest in my product.

I named it Goslink Messenger, after Ryan Gosling. Since then, people have mentioned it many times, even a branch of one chat appeared there, and during one of the global Telegram failures, I communicated with some friends through Goslink Messenger.

Project closure

Despite all this, I closed the project, because due to its experimental nature it turned out to be problematic and it was difficult to develop it further. And I didn’t see much point.

Conclusion

Now I have a job again that I enjoy, but Goslink Messenger will always have a special place in my heart. Not only did this project teach me WebSocket, Angular, Express, CI/CD, and Nginx, but it also gave me valuable experience that helped me become a better developer. This project showed me that even failures can lead to meaningful achievements and new opportunities.

By the way, the source code is open, and anyone can read it and deploy the project: