Introducing Vela, a new kind of workplace messaging platform
Bringing back human connection to the workplace in a remote-first world.
Hey! I’m Josh, full time software engineer by day and founder of Vivian Technologies by, well, morning and weekends. I’ve been working fully remote for about 4 years now for various startups and have been consistently overwhelmed with information and underwhelmed with the status quo of communication within remote teams. Often, I feel like I don’t have any socialization with my co-workers throughout the week, limited to standard, over-processed Agile Meeting and random voice chats. Now I already have enough trouble in my day-to-day social life, so the isolation during work hours has had an even more negative effect on my mental wellbeing over the years. That combined with constant notifications at any hour, pressure to always stay “online”, and poor app performance on desktop results in existing workplace messaging platforms like Slack and Teams causing unnecessary stress and anxiety for many, me included.
That’s why I’m so exited to be working on Vela, the open source messaging platform that fosters human connection in a remote-first world.
Embracing natural conversation
In Vela, everything happens within a “room”. You can think of these like channels in other messaging apps. Within a room, you and your teammates can have your door “open” or “closed”. While open, you can converse with everyone else in the room via push-to-talk voice chat. While closed, you won’t hear anything and (optionally) notifications from the entire app will be silenced.
The goal here is to bring back natural conversation and replace a large chunk of communication that has been transitioned to instant messaging over the last decade or so. Have a question or just want to spark up some quick, friendly conversation? Anyone who’s open to that will hear it, enabling more socialization within remote workplaces.
Bringing context back
Another crucial aspect that has largely been lost in the chaos of instant messaging is the context of the conversation. Countless times, I’d need to go back and find a specific piece of information that gets buried in a sea of messages, oftentimes pertaining to multiple topics. Some apps are especially guilty of this (I’m looking at you, Slack).
To address this, Vela’s core communication method outside of room voice chat is a threads implementation similar to a traditional online forum like Reddit, but private and end-to-end encrypted within your workspace. In addition, you can add tags to each thread to further distill context and make information easier to find later.
Lightning-fast macOS client
Nearly every messaging platform out there uses Electron for their desktop apps for “quick” development speed and cross platform compatibility. Oftentimes, companies will simply package their existing web app (with adjustments of course) into an Electron desktop app. While this can enable developers to rapidly ship product, the result is a slow application that hogs an enormous amount of memory, all while potentially opening a large array of attack vectors for bad actors (more on that in a future article).
Vela is a native macOS app written in Swift and designed for peak performance. As you’ve probably seen in previous screenshots, there’s no standard “window”. The app resides in a floating panel (literally the NSPanel
class) that can be toggled via a global hotkey, just like Spotlight or Raycast. Every thread, message, and action can be searched for and executed by simply typing in the command bar.
☝️ I absolutely adore Raycast, so I’ve built Vela to work well as a companion to it.
My intention here is to keep the app as transparent and out of your way as possible. In a way, Vela is designed to be an extension of your OS rather than another application you need to deal with. In fact, it won’t even appear in your dock.
Oh, and every action in the app is bound to a customizable hotkey for overthinkers power users like me.
Interoperability with Slack and Teams
I want to make sure everyone can use Vela without needing to persuade their entire company to migrate off of Slack or any other messaging platform. Threads and direct messages are fully interoperable with Slack, while support for other platforms such as Microsoft Teams is coming in the near future. For now, open room voice chat is limited to only those who are on Vela, but this may change as I continue to architect a solution for this.
Open source
Finally, I’ll be open sourcing the entire Vela platform on GitHub, including the backend API written in Rust. I hope to provide transparency into the platform in addition to enabling others to contribute and help build a better remote workplace. Anyone with experience writing high performance Swift and Rust code is welcome to create a pull request!
I’ll be posting the GitHub repository link once the platform is ready.
What’s next
Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be writing here on Substack about my experience as a solo technical founder and progress while building Vela. I plan on having an alpha available later this year.
If you have any thoughts or suggestions, I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments! For more formal discussions, you can reach me at josh@tryvela.com.