
How complex is it to write your own chat server?
If you write your own chat server with Whatsapp like functionalities (1:1 messages, group chat, communities, file upload, typing indicator,read receipts, reply, block user, remove from group, mark a message as important etc.) from scratch for both backend and frontend. Would you consider it as a proper SDE II level skill or above? Iām not expecting it to handle Whatsapp scale but it should be able to handle a few lakh users
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Why do you wanna write it from scratch? Just search for some open source projects and modify them to your needs. Your time to build would be significantly reduced

Want to build it from scratch to improve my development skills

Should be an SDE 2 level work in that case.
Scope out MVP i.e. 2 people should be able to sign up find each other and then message one another.
Deploy only the MVP first, and then keep adding other features. Nothing like building it incrementally