Healing Foundations Counseling is a counseling practice. I built their mobile app: a React Native client tied to an AWS backend I designed and deployed end-to-end (DynamoDB, AppSync, Lambda, API Gateway).
I shipped the project solo as a freelance engineer. The app supported clients and providers as two role-based views over the same backend, so the same codebase served both sides of the relationship without forcing either to leave the app.
One-person team, end-to-end customer ownership
There was no PM, no design partner, no spec doc. Just a counseling practice that wanted a wellness app and a working relationship I had to build with them:
- Requirements gathering directly with the practice. Translating "we want clients to do wellness check-ins and providers to see them" into the actual data model, the actual two-role surface, the actual feed of supporting content.
- Communication on tradeoffs. When scope expanded, the conversation about what we shipped first vs. later was mine to lead. The customer doesn't always know which features are cheap and which are expensive; that's the freelance engineer's job to surface honestly.
- Architecture decisions on a long timeline. Picking AWS services that the practice could afford to operate after I was gone, structuring the codebase so the next engineer could read it.
These are the same skills product-engineer roles at AI-applied teams ask for: sit close to a real customer, do the discovery work yourself, ship something honest, and leave it in a state someone else can extend.
Wellness check-ins, with the provider seeing it back
Clients did wellness check-ins on the app: structured prompts about how they were doing, what they were experiencing, what was helping. That data fed the provider portal, where clinicians saw each client's history rendered as graphs and charts. A provider could open a client's record and read the trajectory at a glance instead of paging through individual entries.
A feed for the wellness journey
Recovery and ongoing care isn't just check-ins. It's the surrounding content that helps people make sense of what they're doing. The app's feed surfaced:
- Curated news articles relevant to clients' wellness contexts.
- In-app suggestions for actions a client could take to support their journey.
- Adjunctive therapy facilitation features. Surfaces that pointed clients toward complementary care beyond the primary provider relationship.
The handoff
When Deloitte's offer came in, I had to wind down freelance work. The Healing Foundations engagement wasn't done. So a piece of the project became finding the engineer who would finish it: interviewing candidates, picking the right one, onboarding them through the architecture and the unfinished work, then transitioning ownership cleanly so they could ship the rest.
That kind of handoff (leaving a codebase in a state another engineer can pick up without archaeology) is its own piece of work. The job wasn't just to build the app; it was to leave the project in a place where someone else could finish what I started.