Happs is a project with goal of applying the findings of positive psychology (aka science of happiness) with technology. The foundation for Happs is based off The How of Happiness by Dr. Sonya Lyubomirsky, which is an excellent, pragmatic approach to positive psychology.
We say money can't buy happiness -- this is why America is the wealthiest country in the world, yet the 17th happiest and have been unhappy long before the 2009 financial crisis. We're pursuing liberty, but we're not pusuing life or happiness.
The field of positive psychology is relatively new and aims at changing the average person's happiness from normal to high. Through rigorous testing and studies, it has been proven that certain activities can have significant effects on both affective happiness (day-to-day joy, laughter) and evaluatative happiness (life satisfaction).
With the growth of technology and this new science, we are at the point in history where these two fields can combine to make happy-increasing apps, or as we like to call it, Happs.
Although there are several things proven to increase both forms of happiness, our current focus is on making an awesome Happ for showing Gratitude. The evidence is clear -- writing down three things you're grateful a day for 30 days can drastically increase both affective and evaluatative happiness. There's even research showing changes in the physical structure of your brain over time as you do this challenge.
The next set of Happs will focus on being in the moment and savoring life. Details TBD.
After that, our next big project will be gamification of RAKs. The details of how it will be played is still in the works. Doing daily RAKs is one of the best things you can do to increasing both forms of happiness, so don't wait for the Happ to come out to start!
As the founder, I can personally speak to the challenge that it is for inexperienced developers to get employment, no matter how much demand their is. To give back, I am making it my mission to help newbies out, so don't be afraid to contribute!
If you're a newbie Rails developer and this sounds like something you'd be interested in, there's a couple strongly recommended preliminary steps. Go to this awesome learning path for becoming a Rails developer and complete everything up to and including Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial. If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email.
For bonus points, check out Git Immersion.
By default, any spec with :slow is ignored. To run these specs:
$ SLOW_SPECS=true bundle exec rspec spec
In the terminal, run:
$ guard
Upon saving a spec file, that file will be tested automatically. This does ignore specs tagged with :slow.
Going through the code base, you'll notice there is lots of duplication in the code. This is intentional since it's better to have duplication than to have the wrong abstraction. Everything that's duplicated has plans to be vastly changed and improved in the near future.