GoATree

Inspiration

I like to sometimes code Terminal User Interfaces in python and saw bubbletea recommended heavily. So I decided to use Royal Hackaway as an opportunity to check it out as well as golang as a whole.

There is a discord bot called Grow a Tree who's functionality seemed reasonably simple to replicate to provide a goal.

What it does

The user launches the client which connects to a central server to allow multiple people to share a tree. The idea is that the users work together every interval (for testing it is currently 15s) to make sure the tree is watered so it can keep growing. It does this

How I built it

I used websockets to communicate between the client and the server, using the json module of go to conveniently go between json and structs.

The client uses bubbletea + a few extensions (bubbles , lipgloss and the image from teacup)

Not coding related but they also have a very nice tool to use for gifs. https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs, which i used to produce the gif at the top.

Challenges I ran into

Apparently if I add error handlers to specific parts of the code it results in concurrency errors? I believe it is incorrect usage of loggers, and can't use stdout as it is occupied with the user interface.

I was not familiar with the architecture bubbletea uses before and this cause confusion when integrating it with the websocket library.