DEV Community

Cover image for Habitie.net Dev Update #1
Ben Klein
Ben Klein

Posted on

Habitie.net Dev Update #1

Aloha guys! πŸŽ‰

I had this idea of Dev Updates for my passion project some time ago, but for some reason I had some doubts. "Is this even interesting?" or "Will they blame me?" and so on. Then I recently published my article about UseCases as Rails Architecture with more or less the same doubts and the reaction of the people was awesome. Thank you so much! ❀️

So I learned, that DEV.to is an exceptional kind community of nice people who are sharing stuff, giving constructive feedback and encourage each other. And I think that's amazing 😍

So here we are: This is the first Dev Update post of a hopefully long chain of posts in which I want to update you folks about the development state of habitie.net.

The Idea

First of all, what is this all about?

I use lots of apps to organize my life, my work, my motivation and whatever. Wunderlist, Trello, Habitica, Evernote, Google Calendar, and much more. I really love the idea of Habitica. But for some reason it never really helped me in a long term. I started to collect ideas and concepts of how a app have to be so it can help me to achieve my goals, track my todos, organize my stuff and everything. At some point I had enough and started coding some stuff in my spare time. I called it habitie.

The idea is to have an app with minimal gamification, where you can track your goals, define tasks, recurring tasks and habits. A habit can be negative (like smoking), positive (like doing the laundry) or both. Ticking a task or a habit gives you karma. Karma because I like the concept. You do something good (for your life or for others) and something good will come back around. Karma works like experience and you have a experience level like you know it from video games. Also you can define rewards which have a drop chance based on their rarity. Habits and Tasks have a difficulty. This together defines a drop chance for your rewards. Doing simple tasks will probably not drop the super rare epic reward (maybe a vacation or that new gaming pc you wish for), but doing the difficult habits will probably will. This way I want to bring my impulsive buying behavior under control, I think. However it motivates me we stuff I want to have is coupled with tasks I have to do. There also some builtin items, which work like buffs and give you some in-app advantage. That's the basic idea behind habitie. Besides that we have plenty of awesome concepts, ideas and features we want to add to make habitie an app which helps you to organize your life. Checklists, Boards, Notes, Integrations and so on. Stay tuned! 😁

The Team

Eventually I gathered some really nice people around me to help me to build this SaaS product. Now we're a team of 5 germany and austria based dudes. Including 3 developers, a designer and a psychologist. Together we're working on this passion project in our spare time. Despite we're following a professional approach on the project. Thus we're working with the agile method, Boards, professional tool chain like InVision, GitLab, Heroku, Sentry and so on. We have regular meetings every two weeks to coordinate, talk about current topics and plan our sprints.

Despite we have some really great ideas and so much on our to do list, it's difficult to keep up the pace. A passion project on which we're all working on in our spare time is struggling with the huge time effort which software development brings with it. So team growth is currently one of our highest priorities.

The MVP

However we have built a MVP, which you can find on https://www.habitie.net

It doesn't still contain all the basic features and sure still have some bugs, but it's a good point to start from. Feel free to give it a try and share your feedback and ideas πŸ˜„

Currently we're working on a new fancy UX, the mobile app and rounding up the basic features so we can tackle the great stuff on our idea list.

I want to update you on a weekly basis and hope to find some early adopters for the app.


When you have questions, don't hesitate to ask. When you have feedback, please share with us. And when you want to work with us, please contact me and we'll find a way πŸ˜„

Have a good time folks!

Cover image by Sean Stratton

Top comments (0)