When we last left off, we had organized our application and touched on a few of the missing areas of functionality that we really needed to make our application feel a little more finished. Our application is largely functional, and if we were so inclined, we could easily polish and ship this initial pass as a decent MVP (minimally viable product)! Take a moment to pat yourself on the back; getting anything completed can be a very difficult thing to do, and you're already well on your way to launching the next unicorn product! Of course, launching any kind of social app nowadays without something to enable some sort of real-time communication would never fly with investors, so the next thing we'll tackle is integrating chat into the polls. We also have a little bit of minor code cleanup to do as part of our development process. It can sometimes be nice to sprinkle in small, easy wins to keep you motivated in longer feature development sessions, which this will absolutely be one of, so we'll try to work that same rule in to this chapter as well to keep your momentum up!

In this chapter, we'll learn a few new things and dive into a few other missing elements:

• Understanding a data model for a chat application
• Building the data model for a chat application
• Integrating chat with the data model into Phoenix
• Cleaning up the navigation layout of our application