October 2025: Laying the foundation

Welcome to the first Walling Journal update.

We know you've been waiting for news about what's happening with Walling. We're launching this monthly journal to give you transparent progress reports on the rebuild — what we're doing, why decisions are taking time, and where we're headed.

If you haven't already, check out our About page to learn more about our backstory. This post focuses on where we are today.

Why we started over

When we acquired Walling, we inherited a product built by a solo founder over several years — impressive work, but with architectural limitations that made it difficult to add critical features you've been requesting.

The technical reality:

1. A monolithic codebase - manageable for one engineer but difficult for a team.
2. Older frontend stack — the VueJS version used was deprecated and required significant migration.
3. Lacking enterprise-grade patterns - missing separation of concerns, layered architecture, testing (unit, integration, E2E), CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation), etc.

We initially tried to work within these constraints. We brought in a team and spent six months attempting to rewrite and build from what was there. By April 2025, it became clear: we couldn't build the future of Walling on this foundation.

So we made the hard call to start over.

What we're building

We're not just rewriting code — we're reimagining Walling's architecture so we can improve the core experience and ship features faster.

The technical foundation:

• Modern, scalable architecture using domain-driven design
• REST and GraphQL APIs for flexibility and performance
• Modular, event-driven system for decoupled feature development and real-time updates
• Built with NestJS (backend) and React (frontend)

Why this matters to you:

• Performance — Designed to handle large walls efficiently.
• Reliability — Clean, tested code reduces bugs and edge cases.
• Faster development — We can ship new features and improvements in weeks, not months.
• Scalability — The product can grow with your needs without breaking.
• Better experience — Smoother interactions, faster loads, more responsive editing.

What we've completed

This hasn't been idle time. Here's what we've done in the last 6 months:

✅ Core architecture rebuilt — The backend foundation is in place with proper separation of concerns, testing, and scalability in mind

✅ API layer complete — Both REST and GraphQL endpoints are functional and documented

✅ Authentication & user management — Enterprise-grade security and user management

✅ UI component library migration — Modern, accessible component system for better user experience

✅ Development tooling — Proper testing, CI/CD, and deployment infrastructure that lets us ship confidently

✅ Core content components — The initial foundations for walls, sections, views and bricks are in place

✅ Implemented initial undo / redo functionality — One of the most commonly requested features (and near impossible to do in the previous architecture) has been implemented

What we're working on now

1. Workspaces & member management: This lays the foundation for sharing and collaboration. We're building:

• Workspace creation and management
• Member invitations and permissions
• Role-based access control
• Team management features

2. UI component migration: Ensuring component consistency and design across the application as we build out the interface.
3. User account management workflows: The essential account features you expect — profile photos, name changes, email updates, password management, and account deletion.

The challenge we're facing

Here's the honest truth: this is taking longer than we hoped, but we're on a productive path.

We're balancing two competing forces:

1. Speed — You want the new version as soon as possible
2. Quality — We’re committed to proper architecture and technology decisions, development best practices, and long-term maintainability.

This isn't just about writing code. It's about making the right decisions on libraries, technologies, and architectural approaches to meet our needs — both now and in the future.

Sometimes we build something, ship it internally, and then realize there's a better approach we should refactor to. That's part of doing this right. We'd rather take the time to course-correct when we discover better solutions than forge ahead with suboptimal decisions.

Some days we ship major features. Other days we spend refactoring an approach or evaluating different technical options. That uncertainty makes it hard to commit to a launch date, but it's necessary to build something sustainable.

The goal isn't just to recreate what exists — it's to build Walling properly so we can improve it quickly for years to come.

What's coming in November

Our focus for next month:

• Complete the workspace & member management system
• Begin building the comments data model in the new architecture to support wall discussions and content-linked comment threads
• Continue the UI component migration across the app

A realistic timeline

We're not ready to give you a specific launch date, what we can tell you:

• We need to reach feature parity with core functionality before beta.
• The core editing experience needs to meet basic requirements including drag and drop reordering, content capture, and reliability.
• Workspaces and collaboration features need to be solid.
• UI/UX must be clean, performant, and stable.

We'll keep you updated with monthly progress reports right here. You'll see exactly what we're building, what's blocking us, and how we're solving problems.

Thank you for sticking with us

If you've stayed subscribed through this long silence, thank you. We know it hasn't been easy.

We're working hard to honor the vision of Walling while building something that can grow with you for years to come.

The current version of Walling remains fully functional and supported. Nothing is going away. But we're building something better, and we wanted you to see the process.

See you next month with another update.

— The Walling Team