Mental health has been a rising issue lately since the pandemic and it caught my attention right away since I was going crazy being stuck in my tiny studio in New York City that has no view. Also, I was consistently looking for ways to help users on Goodnight Journal who expressed depression and anxiety through public journals. Some of public journals really got me concerned and think more about features that I can implement to help them feel better. It kind of came naturally that I want to do something about it. …

Happy is a mental health app from Goodnight Journal designed to be used in 2 minutes or under for people who do not have a full hour to fully focus on meditation.

Got a minute? Try Happy to stay healthy mentally and be happy!

Happy offers;

• ✌️ Breathing techniques for keeping calm and relaxed
• ✌️ Shift your mind from stress and anxiety
• ✌️ Affirmation and positive quotes to shape your day
• ✌️ Sleeping tips and tricks
• ✌️ Calm relaxing music to enjoy
• ✌️ Free unlimited secure private journal
• ✌️ Online journal community to talk to people like you
• ✌ and more!

Download Happy on App store and Play store.

• iOS…

Goodnight Journal was launched on Jan 1, 2013 and has been serving over 100,000 members in the world. It started as a side project and became a full time job when I decided to revamp the app and community completely.

I quit my job to build the brand new app that makes writing journals much easier with the intuitive simple user interface that also works faster than ever. I wrote a blog article about my journey to build the new Goodnight Journal if you want to read more about it.

Why it is free to write private journals but not public journals?

Another main focus that I have is to build the high quality community where all journal writers can connect and interact with each other. After running Goodnight Journal for 7 years with no membership fee and any advertisements, I noticed that it’s very hard to maintain the app with good quality content. Spams and unconsidered comments were made every day which also cost me more time and money to maintain the app. To solve the problem and being able to fund the project for me to pay full attention to the app, I decided to implement a freemium model to the new app. …

I may have presented myself as a happy person surrounded by lots of friends. Yes, I’m a happy person and am fortunate to have good friends around me. However, it took me a while to live and think this way. Maybe nothing has really changed around me but I know that the way I look and think through things has completely changed. Now I look at things in a more optimistic way than before. It didn’t happen overnight but it slowly turned me into this way after simply writing down things from my mind to actual writing.

In this blog, I wanted to share my story about how journaling helped me overcome my anxiety and depression and built an app to write a journal with the hopes that this will be helpful to other people going through the same situation like myself out there. …

Writing your ideas on a piece of paper has been proven to clarify the ability to think which is why children, from a very young age, are advised to brainstorm before an important assignment. Keeping a journal is similar to this notion, however, it involves writing down feelings, life experiences and thoughts along with the ideas. The coronavirus quarantine provides a perfect opportunity for you to pick up a valuable habit like journaling. …

After running the Goodnight Journal that I built on WordPress 7 years ago, I finally decided to rebuild it from scratch on a new platform to make it a better app for personal journaling.

In this blog article, I wanted to share my experience of building a React app on AWS Amplify.

I decided to use React and AWS because I used them on a couple of projects recently and they have a good size of the community that offers great resources to utilize.

My workflow

Since I’m the only one building the app with a couple of developers on a contract basis, I was able to make the workflow very flexible in a way that is most effective to me. Coming from a designer background, it made things easier for me to get the entire UI first and build things on top of it. …

After living in the U.S. for 14 years, I finally got my green card in June 2019. The moment that I have been waiting for years.

I came to the States in Oct 2006. I landed at O’hare airport and ended up spending 10 years in Chicago. I was inspired by the party culture that I saw from the movie called American pie and 23 years old I was brave enough to come to the U.S. to experience that from South Korea. I signed up at an ESL school in Chicago and started my journey in the U.S. …