Rebuilding NyChat V2 — What We Learned About Building Too Much at Once

Building software is rarely difficult because of a single feature.

It becomes difficult when dozens of features start interacting with each other.

That was one of the biggest lessons we learned while rebuilding NyChat V2.

We started with a relatively simple idea: create a real-time chat platform where people could communicate without creating accounts or leaving behind a permanent identity.

But as NyChat evolved, the requirements grew.

Real-time messaging. Client-side encryption. Temporary rooms. Reconnection. Media sharing. Voice notes. WebRTC voice and video calls. Permissions. Capability-based access. Moderation and reporting. Redis-backed room state. SEO and structured metadata. Testing. Documentation.

Each feature made sense individually.

The problem was building too many of them before properly testing how they behaved together.

And eventually, we experienced one of the most frustrating cycles in software development:

Fix one bug. Create ten more.

That experience changed how we think about building software.

Where NyChat Started

The original idea behind NyChat was intentionally simple.

We wanted temporary communication without the usual friction of:

Account creation
Password management
Phone numbers
Email addresses
Permanent profiles
Persistent chat histories

Instead, users could create a temporary room and share it with others.

The goal wasn't to build another social network.

It was to build something people could use when they simply needed a temporary private communication space.

That simplicity became one of the principles we wanted to preserve even as the product became significantly more capable.

NyChat V2 Was More Than a UI Rewrite

When we started working on V2, it would have been easy to think of it as a frontend redesign.

It wasn't.

The rebuild touched almost every layer of the application.

The architecture had to account for:

Real-time communication
Room lifecycle
Encryption
Reconnection
Temporary media
WebRTC signaling
Authorization
Storage
Moderation
Security boundaries
Performance
Discoverability

The challenge wasn't simply making each system work.

The challenge was making them work together.

That's where things became interesting.

Building Encryption Into the Architecture

One of the most important decisions we made was keeping message encryption on the client.

NyChat uses the browser's Web Crypto API with AES-256-GCM for text messages.

The room secret is kept in the URL hash rather than being sent to the backend.

That distinction matters.

The backend can coordinate the room and realtime communication without needing to receive the room's encryption secret.

This wasn't something we wanted to bolt onto the application later.

Encryption affects the way rooms, URLs, messages, reconnection, and client state work.

So it had to become part of the architecture itself.

Temporary Rooms Change Everything

A temporary room sounds simple:

Create room → chat → destroy room.

In reality, there are many more questions.

What happens when someone disconnects?

What happens when they reconnect?

What happens when the room becomes empty?

What happens when a user tries to access an expired room?

What state belongs in memory?

What state belongs in Redis?

What happens to temporary media?

What happens to authorization?

Once a system is ephemeral, lifecycle management becomes a feature of its own.

We eventually designed NyChat around temporary room lifecycles rather than treating them as ordinary persistent chat rooms.

Then Came WebRTC

We also wanted NyChat to support real-time voice and video communication.

That introduced another entire system.

WebRTC brings its own complexity:

Peer connections
Signaling
Permissions
ICE candidates
Connection state
Reconnection
Participant limits
Device handling
Voice/video state
Failure scenarios

NyChat uses the backend as a signaling relay while media communication is designed around peer-to-peer WebRTC connections.

That sounds straightforward until you combine it with temporary rooms and realtime membership.

A participant can join.

Another participant can leave.

Someone can reconnect.

A permission can be denied.

A peer connection can fail.

And suddenly, a feature that worked perfectly in isolation starts interacting with five other systems.

Temporary Media Added Another Boundary

Text messages and media are not the same security problem.

NyChat supports temporary images, files, and voice notes.

But we deliberately do not describe that media pipeline as end-to-end encrypted.

That's an important distinction.

Text messages use client-side encryption.

Media uses temporary storage and short-lived capability-based access controls, with the goal of minimizing how long uploaded content exists.

Being precise about security boundaries is more important than making a product sound perfectly secure.

We would rather clearly explain what a system does than make a vague claim that sounds better.

Redis Became the Source of Truth

As realtime functionality grew, we needed a reliable way to coordinate room state.

The backend uses Redis as the source of truth for ephemeral room state, with local memory used for performance-oriented caching.

This gave us a much better foundation for handling:

Room membership
Temporary state
Realtime coordination
Room lifecycle
Expiration
Presence-related information

Again, this wasn't just an implementation detail.

Changing the state model affected the rest of the application.

And this is where the importance of architecture became increasingly obvious.

Our Biggest Mistake

The biggest lesson from the V2 rebuild wasn't about encryption.

It wasn't about WebRTC.

It wasn't even about Redis.

It was about when we tested things.

At different points during development, we fell into a pattern that looked something like this:

Feature → Feature → Feature → Feature → Test everything

It felt productive.

We were adding functionality quickly.

But eventually the bill came due.

A better development loop would have been:

Feature → Test → Break → Fix → Refactor → Test again → Next feature

The difference looks small.

The consequences aren't.

The "Fix One Bug, Create Ten More" Problem

When systems are isolated, debugging is relatively straightforward.

Suppose messaging breaks.

You investigate messaging.

But once messaging depends on encryption, room state, WebSockets, reconnection, permissions, and lifecycle management, a small change can have unexpected consequences.

You fix one thing.

Something else breaks.

You fix that.

A third thing breaks.

Eventually, you're no longer debugging a feature.

You're debugging the interactions between features.

That was one of the most painful parts of the rebuild.

Complexity Multiplies Through Interactions

Consider a simplified example.

Chat

You have:

Messages
WebSockets
Rooms
Encryption
Reconnection

Now add media.

You introduce:

Uploads
Capability tokens
Temporary storage
Permissions
Cleanup

Then add WebRTC.

Now you have:

Signaling
Peer connections
Room membership
Reconnection
Device permissions
Connection state

None of these systems are inherently impossible.

The difficulty comes from their intersections.

A bug doesn't always belong to one feature.

Sometimes it lives in the boundary between two features.

What We Would Do Differently

If we were starting NyChat V2 again, we'd change the development process more than the technology.

We'd build in smaller vertical slices.

For example:

Step 1 — Build messaging

Make basic rooms and realtime messaging work.

Then test it aggressively.

Step 2 — Add encryption

Add encryption.

Test encryption.

Test invalid keys.

Test reconnects.

Test room changes.

Test message failures.

Step 3 — Add media

Build the media pipeline separately.

Test upload limits.

Test authorization.

Test expiration.

Test cleanup.

Step 4 — Add WebRTC

Get signaling working.

Test joining.

Test leaving.

Test reconnection.

Test failed connections.

Then test WebRTC together with room lifecycle.

Step 5 — Integrate everything

Only after individual systems are stable should we increase the complexity of their interactions.

This approach feels slower.

In practice, it can be much faster.

Because debugging ten interacting features at once is significantly slower than debugging one feature at a time.

Testing Isn't the Last Step

One of the clearest lessons we took from NyChat V2 is that testing shouldn't be something that happens after development.

Testing is part of development.

When we test immediately, the context is still fresh.

We know what changed.

We know what we expected.

We know where to look.

When we wait until dozens of changes have accumulated, failures become ambiguous.

Was the problem introduced by encryption?

Was it the room manager?

Was it reconnection?

Was it media?

Was it a UI state?

Was it a backend event?

The larger the gap between implementation and testing, the harder those questions become.

Documentation Helped More Than We Expected

We also spent a significant amount of time documenting NyChat.

Architecture. Encryption. Realtime protocols. Room lifecycle. Media. WebRTC. Security. Authorization. Deployment. Testing. Development.

At first, documentation can feel like something you write after the real work is finished.

But writing documentation forced us to explain the system clearly.

And whenever we couldn't explain something clearly, it often meant the design itself wasn't clear enough.

Documentation became another form of architecture review.

If we couldn't describe a flow simply, we had to ask why.

What NyChat V2 Became

After all the iterations, NyChat V2 became much more than the temporary chat application we originally imagined.

It now brings together:

Accountless temporary rooms
Client-side AES-256-GCM text encryption
Up to 15 participants per room
Realtime messaging
WebRTC voice and video communication
Temporary image and file sharing
Voice notes
Capability-based media access
Redis-backed ephemeral room state
Authorization and moderation systems
Reporting
Reconnection handling
Explicit security boundaries
Structured SEO/AEO/GEO metadata
Extensive technical documentation
Automated frontend testing

But the most important thing we built wasn't any individual feature.

It was a better understanding of how these features should be built.

The Lesson We Took Away

Software development often rewards visible progress.

A new feature feels like progress.

A new page feels like progress.

A new integration feels like progress.

Testing doesn't always feel like progress.

Refactoring doesn't always feel like progress.

Removing unnecessary complexity definitely doesn't feel like progress.

But they can be the things that make future progress possible.

We learned that building more isn't always moving faster.

Sometimes the fastest way forward is to stop adding features and make sure what already exists is solid.

Build it.

Test it.

Break it.

Fix it.

Test it again.

Then move forward.

That's the development mindset we're taking forward from NyChat V2.

Because eventually, complexity catches up with every growing project.

The goal isn't to avoid complexity completely.

The goal is to control it before it controls you.

Explore NyChat

NyChat is available at nychat.nyxen.in.

The project and its technical documentation are available through the Nyxen engineering repositories.

We're continuing to improve the platform, its architecture, and the way we build it.

And hopefully, the next time we start adding a large set of features, we'll remember one thing a little earlier:

Test continuously. Not eventually.