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My first socket program: a LAN chat room

A console chat app in Python with a server and multiple clients, and the networking basics I picked up building it.

This was my first real socket project. The idea is simple: run a server on one machine, connect to it from others on the same network, and pass messages between them.

How it works

So one machine would run the server while clients could connect to the server’s local ip to chat in real time.

What tripped me up

Getting machines to talk to each other was a lot harder than I thought, having to research how to find the right local ip, port, and handling what happens when a client disconnects without any reason.

Why it mattered

Sockets felt alien to me until I had researched it and now I feel a lot more confident on how they work and how to utilize them.

Source on GitHub