Gratistellar Devlog: Why an app about gratitude?
I don't know where the idea came from.
That's the truth. I do remember when, though, funnily enough. I was driving to my cousin's house for a family barbecue on Labour Day weekend. My partner and mum were with me, and we'd been talking about life, about what it actually means to notice the good things in your life. Not in a vague, poster-on-the-wall way, but deliberately. Concretely. As a practice.
I've been working on gratitude for a couple of years with my therapist. Everyone's dealing with something, especially these days it seems, and gratitude can often help. It doesn't fix anything that's wrong, but it does help you see what you do have, and that can genuinely help. It is a practice, though, and takes effort. One of the things I appreciate about my therapist is that she provides me citations and proof, so I know there are studies that prove what we're doing works. Gratitude, practised regularly, genuinely shifts something in how you relate to your life.
We were talking about all of this and the conversation tapered off as it does. As we sat quietly and I drove, the concept arrived, fully formed, as though I'd thought of it before or heard about it elsewhere: an app where every grateful moment becomes a star. Not a list. Not a streak counter. A sky. Your personal sky, slowly filling with everything you're grateful for until you've built yourself a galaxy of gratitude.
I'm a designer and a tinkerer. I don't really code. I understand a lot of code and logical structure, the grammar, if you will, but I don't speak the language. I wanted to try building something to help learn how to code and this felt like exactly the right idea to try it with. This idea was simple, though. It's just entries of data and a screen of stars for each and a beautiful sea of stars. I had a vision of something almost painterly. I was thinking about Van Gogh, about the Starry Night, with its swirling night skies. I wanted something that felt alive and warm rather than clinical.
Whether I fully achieved that is another question. But that was the feeling I was chasing. The goal was never to build a successful app in any commercial sense. I wasn't thinking about users or revenue or marketing. I wanted to learn something, and I wanted to make something that might genuinely help people (including me) build a real gratitude practice. Something that made the act of recording a grateful thought feel meaningful. You write it down, and it becomes a star. You come back tomorrow and do it again. Over weeks and months, you build a universe out of the moments you chose to pay attention to. That felt worth making.
The fun thing is that in focusing on this for the past months, it's really centred gratitude in my own mind. I've literally spent hours each week thinking about how to make all this work, and in creating my own list of gratitudes as I went. Spoiler alert: the app is out. It works! I made the thing and there are people using it. That itself gives me a bit of joy, whether it's just 5 people or 20 trying it out. I feel like I've succeeded and I'm proud of it.
You can check it out on the Google Play store: GratiStellar