The very first version of Wall of History was published seven years ago, on February 23^rd, 2019. The oldest version of the site preserved on the Wayback Machine (that isn’t totally broken) is a couple months older — you can check it out here, if you want a blast from the past.

Working on this site has been quite an adventure. When I started out, I didn’t know a damn thing about web development — that first version was built in Adobe Muse, a drag-and-drop website builder so unbelievably shitty, I think Adobe had announced its discontinuation before I started using it. The history of Wall of History, in a way, is also the history of me — most of the skills I learned for my bachelor’s in CS were applied to this site first, and the real-world experience I gained working on it sharpened my skills enough for the PhD I’m doing now. It’s also the history of me in that, through this site, I’ve made more friends than I can count, who’ve inspired me to keep making Wall of History better, and inspired me to make myself better. I would not be the person I am today if not for the people I met because of this stupid BIONICLE website I started working on in my parents’ basement almost a decade ago.

Despite all the good it’s done me, though, Wall of History has become a bit of a problem — I can’t keep up. As the site has grown, so too have my ambitions for it, to the point that I can barely wrap my head around what I’m working on. That’s the main reason the latest update has taken so long — I open up VS Code, and just… don’t know where to start! And that’s not even to mention all the other projects I’m involved in now, such as Myths and Legacy, 810NICLE Day, and most recently BRiCKSHELF (a beast even bigger than Wall of History in many ways).

Which is why I’m starting to think… maybe this isn’t something I can do by myself anymore. I’ve previously been reluctant to let anyone else help with the actual development of Wall of History, since I’m historically kind of a control freak, and was wary of publishing code I didn’t personally understand inside and out. But maybe that’s just not sustainable. Maybe, for the Wall of History the rest of you see to become the Wall of History in my head, I’ll need more help. That’s why, for the first time in seven years, I’m opening up applications for the Wall of History and BRiCKSHELF development team. If you’re interested in helping build the future of these sites (and the handful of others I’ve got in the works), let me know here. Anyone with web design or development experience is welcome to apply, and while I’m gonna refrain from going into detail about this at the moment, I do intend for team members to be compensated (though this will not, of course, be a full-time job).

Thanks for reading, and thanks for making the last seven years so great. Wall of History is just getting started.