Mobile Reality

NestJS: overkill or the best decision we made?

We’ve heard this question more times than we can count.

“Isn’t NestJS too much for an MVP?”

And honestly… sometimes it is.

But in one of our recent projects at Mobile Reality, the real problem wasn’t speed.

It was what happens after MVP.

The product was growing fast:
→ more features
→ more developers
→ more complexity

And without structure, things started to break.

That’s when we made the call to go with NestJS.

✔ modular architecture → easier to scale the codebase
✔ dependency injection → cleaner, more maintainable logic
✔ clear structure → faster onboarding for new devs

But yes — there are trade-offs:
❗ steeper learning curve
❗ more setup at the beginning
❗ can feel like overengineering early on

So… was it worth it?
Absolutely.

Because we weren’t building for week 1.
We were building for month 12.

Good architecture isn’t a cost.
It’s an investment. 🚀

🚀 We just open-sourced M**A — Markdown Documents with Mounted Applications

At Mobile Reality, we’ve been building interactive document systems for our clients.

And we kept running into the same problem.

Teams need structured workflows like:
✔ forms
✔ approval flows
✔ triage checklists
✔ structured reports

But building custom UIs for each of them is slow and expensive.

So we built M**A.

M**A extends standard Markdown with interactive components defined in simple YAML blocks — so documents can contain structured workflows without embedding executable code.

What makes M**A different?
⚙️ Deterministic parsing
Markdown + YAML only — no executable code in documents.

🔒 Built-in PII protection
Automatic detection and redaction (hash, mask, omit).

🧾 Tamper-evident audit trail
Append-only event log with hash chaining.

🤖 AI-native design
System prompts that help LLMs generate valid M**A documents.

⚛️ React rendering
Drop an AST into and it works.

Tech stack

TypeScript monorepo with 8 packages, including:
• spec
• parser
• runtime
• React renderer
• validation engine
• prompt pack
• attachable handlers
• LLM eval suite (60+ tests via promptfoo)

We built M**A for next-generation apps where documents need structure, auditability, and security — not just rich text.

🔗 GitHub
https://github.com/MobileReality/mdma

📦 npm
npm install -reality/mdma-parser -reality/mdma-runtime

MIT licensed.
Contributions welcome.