Intentionist

Intentionist is a simple habit-tracking app for friends with similar goals. Whether it's exercising or learning a language, tracking your habits' daily streaks alongside your friends helps you stay encouraged.

I wanted to combine my skills in a larger project. The app is written in TypeScript, with the UI built with React. Firebase pulls a lot of weight - not only is it responsible for the database and user authentication, but some of the app's functionality (such as friend requests) would not be possible without Firebase Cloud Functions. The logic is tested with Jest. State is kept simple with MobX, a tool which always impresses me. The styling solution is Theme UI, which did the job but in the future I would prefer to work with other tools. Having previously mostly worked on small projects, tackling a medium-sized one on my own (some 10,000 lines of code, not including scrapped features) gave me a little more understanding of what scales and what doesn't.

The concept is simple enough. You can create any number of habits, which appear on your page in rows of empty spaces. Each space can be filled with an emoji representing the progress you made that day. The spaces will connect visually when you achieve daily streaks.

Everything is private by default. There's a friend requests system that allows you to add your mates via username. Your friends can see the habits that you've explicitly marked as public. I won't lie, the friends feature was definitely a tricky one to implement.

From there, you can create linked habits. If you share a similar goal with a friend, you can link their habit with yours, and they'll show up side-by-side on your page. The idea is that having these linked habits at a glance increases accountability, giving you that extra boost you need to develop new routines and skills.