I’ve shipped hundreds of projects. Most of them I remember for the tech, the deadline, or the challenge. This one I remember for how it made me feel.
A client came to us wanting to build an iOS app about gratitude. A place where people could write down what they’re thankful for, capture moments with photos and little notes, and build a daily habit of noticing the good stuff. Not just for themselves, but for the people around them too.
Honestly? At first it was another project. We scoped it, planned it, started building. The app had existed before, but it was rough, outdated and broken. So we rebuilt it. We put real care into making it feel warm and personal when you opened it.
And it worked. The app got featured by Apple. It won two Indigo Design Awards for best mobile app design and best UX interface and navigation. Users left reviews saying the app helped them slow down and pay attention to the good things in their lives. For a project that started small, it went way further than any of us expected.
What actually got to me
The client believed in gratitude in a way that was hard to ignore. He wasn’t pitching a product. He was sharing something he lived every day. He used his own app. He talked about thankfulness like it was personal, because it was. And he was always, always grateful for the work we were doing together, even when things took longer than planned.
That energy is contagious. When someone cares that much, you start caring too.
I noticed it while we were building the app. I’d be testing flows, writing entries to check if the journaling felt right, and I’d catch myself actually thinking about “What am I grateful for today?” At first I’d type something random just to test the field. Then I started typing real answers.
My kids. My wife. A calm morning. A good conversation with a teammate. The fact that I get to build things for a living.
It built up to me. I wasn’t trying to start a gratitude practice. We were building an app, but the app kept asking, and at some point we started answering honestly.
The client noticed. We’d hop on calls and he’d ask how the team was doing, not just with the build, but with the app itself. “Are you guys using it? Is it helping?” And I remember telling him, yeah, actually, it kinda is.
He smiled. You could tell that mattered to him more than any feature request.
The thing about people who believe in something
Working with him changed how we approached the project. It stopped being a deliverable. We wanted the design to feel right because we understood what it was for. We wanted the experience to be smooth because we knew people would open this app on hard days, looking for a small moment of calm.
We weren’t just building an app about gratitude. We were starting to practice it.
I kept journaling after we shipped. Not every day, but more than I ever had before. When something good happened, I’d notice it a little more. When things got stressful, I’d try to find one thing that was still okay. It sounds small. It is small. But that’s the whole point, the small stuff adds up.
He passed away
I don’t want to make this heavy, because he wouldn’t have wanted that. He was a positive person until the end. And the good thing, the really good thing, is that he saw it all. He held his phone, opened the app, read the reviews, saw the Apple feature, saw the awards. He knew people were using what he built. He knew it was helping.
And he was grateful for it. Of course he was.
I hope he found peace. I believe God has him in His glory.
What stays with me is that he didn’t just build an app about gratitude. He lived it. And by working with him, by building, coding, using, and testing that app over and over, by answering those little prompts every day, he passed some of that on to me without either of us planning it.
If I had to leave you with one thing
Pay attention to the people around you. Not just what’s happening, not just what needs to get done. The person. Sometimes they’re carrying something worth learning from, and if you’re paying attention, it changes you.
I’m more grateful now than I was before that project. Not because I read a book about it or watched a video. Because a guy who believed in thankfulness asked me to help him build something, and I accidentally started believing in it too.
Rest easy, friend. Your app is still out there helping people notice the good stuff. That’s a beautiful thing to leave behind.