Plane Chat, adventures in simple websites

I recently did some traveling, and was on a long plane ride with some friends sitting far away. While most planes these days have satellite internet, it’s still quite expensive. I thought it would be fun to find a way to connect with each other without requiring us all to chip out $18 USD for the flight.

Insert digression on getting WiFi access on planes without paying here…

About a year ago in a similar situation, my friend hosted their own private hidden WiFi network, They stood up a small flask site, where they posted a static page directing us to connect to their OpenRCT2 server. This was really fun, but the server webpage was just for them posting status messages, I thought it would be nice to extend the idea, having a small message board to connect with friends while on the plane. So I scraped this basic site together with the 10 minutes remaining before we had to board our flight.

There’s really nothing to this app, no user authentication, no UI, no fancy web framework, but it doesn’t need it, it just does what it needs to. After landing, I added a DB, so it didn’t lose the messages that were just stored in-memory each time I restarted the server. I may make a better version of this, there’s lots of fun things to add, a flight timer, name colors, text formatting, you get the idea, but I kinda love how plain simple it is currently, for 10 minutes, it felt pretty cool.