Motivation

Gratitude is a powerful yet under-utilized well-being intervention. The failure isn’t that we don’t know about the benefits of gratitude, it’s that we’re bad at building healthy habits. I wanted to design and build a mobile app that nudged people to practice gratitude more.

Journey

Penn Mobile app design class

I took a class at Penn learning how to design mobile apps, and designed the first iteration of Songbird.

Fullstack Engineering bootcamp

To learn how to build mobile apps, I took the iXperience 2-month Fullstack Engineering bootcamp in South Africa, and interned at Appstrax Tech as a software engineer.

Building

I spent the summer building Songbird!

Movement building

In partnership with Happy Auckland, I ran a gratitude workshop at MoveSpace in New Zealand. I introduced Songbird and taught about gratitude.

Learnings

• Finding a supportive community makes all the difference. Working in the coworking space, MoveSpace, surrounded by people doing their own creative projects, kept me motivated when things were difficult.

• Bias towards action! Leaping in at each stage meant rapid progress, quickly identifying what wouldn’t work, and gaining buy-in from people who pushed me to keep going.