What Cheer is a gratitude journal. Gratitude journaling has shown an ability to improve the author’s happiness and life satisfaction, reduce stress levels, and reduce depressive symptoms. We are constantly bombarded with negativity from our TVs, our news feeds, and the people we interact with daily. In today’s fast-paced world, What Cheer lets users slow down, practice mindfulness, and reflect on the positive aspects of their lives.
It was made by:
What Cheer has full CRUD capability with user authentication. Users can create and log in to an account, where they can add, edit, and delete entries in their journal. If they need inspiration when creating a new journal entry, users can click a button to get an idea prompt.
Users can also upload images along with their journal entries. On their journal page, they can filter the entries they see with a search feature.
What Cheer was built with mobile use in mind, so it was designed for mobile screens.
What Cheer was built with React on the frontend, including React Router, hooks, and context. Users are authenticated using JSON Web Token. Image upload is facilitated by Amazon Web Services S3. The app was designed with vanilla CSS.
The backend is an API built with Python, Django REST framework, and PostgreSQL. Both the back and front ends are deployed to Heroku.
You can see the backend repo here.
Fork and clone or download this repo to get your local copy of the files. Install dependencies with npm. Use yarn start or npm start to launch the development server.
Visit the backend repo, download files and install dependencies with pipenv. Install PostgreSQL and run psql -U postgres -f settings.sql to create your local database. Use python3 manage.py runserver to run the server locally.
Please submit an issue on this repo if you find a bug in the code. To make suggestions on features or other behavior, please make a pull request. Thanks!
In the future we'd like to explore adding social authentication, file download so users can back up their journals, and an "add a song from Spotify" feature.
Asha and Chris are going to dedicate some very long gratitude journal entries to Jennifer Meade. Without her expertise and patience, we wouldn't have made it as far as we did. Hou Chia's regular standup meetings kept us motivated. Thanks to Esin Saribudak, who shared tutorials that helped us with architecting the frontend and deploying the backend. We are also indebted to many of our cohort-mates, who helped us work out bugs and commiserated with us through this challenging project.