Becoming

Becoming helps users turn yearly goals into seasonal progress, track habits and wellness, and unlock Wrapped-style recaps showing who they’re becoming over time.

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## Inspiration

Becoming started from a simple personal problem: I wanted a clean personal dashboard to track my goals, habits, wellness, and progress in one place. I came across a habit tracking app called Loggd and liked the way it made self-improvement feel more visual and organized, but it was paid. That made me think: instead of just looking for another app, why not use this hackathon as a reason to build my own version and learn the stack properly?

The idea grew from there. I did not want to build another basic habit tracker where users just check boxes every day. I wanted something that felt more meaningful — an app built around the question:

> **Who are you becoming this year?**

People do not usually think about growth as random daily tasks. We think in chapters: a new year, a reset season, exam season, a fitness arc, a career-building phase, or a period where we are trying to become more disciplined. Becoming was inspired by that idea: helping people turn yearly goals into seasonal progress and then reflect on what actually changed.

This project was also personal for me as a student builder. I wanted real hackathon experience, but I also wanted to use this project to fix some of my own technical debt from relying too much on AI tools. My goal was not just to submit something; it was to understand the frameworks, database, styling, deployment, and full-stack decisions behind the app.

## What it does

Becoming is a premium personal growth dashboard that helps users define who they want to become, break that vision into seasonal goals, track daily habits and wellness, and generate a Wrapped-style recap of their progress.

The app includes:

- A yearly vision system based around the question **“Who are you becoming this year?”**
- Seasonal chapters such as **“Summer Reset”** or **“Exam Season”**
- Habit and wellness tracking
- Daily check-ins for mood, energy, focus time, hydration, and reflection
- A dashboard showing season score, gem level, goal progress, habit completion, streaks, and consistency
- A Wrapped-style recap called **This Season’s Becoming**
- A demo user flow using Daniel as a preloaded example user

The core idea is that progress should not disappear into a checklist. It should become a story the user can understand, reflect on, and build from.

## How I built it

Becoming was built as a full-stack web application using:

- **Next.js App Router** for the frontend and server-side structure
- **TypeScript** for safer data handling
- **Tailwind CSS** and **shadcn/ui** for the interface
- **Prisma** for database modeling and data access
- **AWS Aurora PostgreSQL** as the primary backend database
- **Vercel** for deployment

Aurora PostgreSQL stores the main product data model, including users, yearly visions, yearly goals, seasons, season goals, habits, daily check-ins, habit logs, and recap cards. Prisma handles the schema and database access layer.

The dashboard uses custom scoring logic to calculate the user’s season score, gem level, habit completion, focus totals, best streak, goal pace, consistency heatmap, and Wrapped-style recap cards.

At a high level, the architecture is:

```txt
User Browser
  ↓
Vercel / Next.js App Router
  ↓
Server-side data access
  ↓
Prisma
  ↓
AWS Aurora PostgreSQL

Technical implementation

The app’s scoring system combines several parts of a user’s season into one progress score:

Season Score =
40% habit completion
25% goal progress
15% focus consistency
10% mood and energy average
10% reflection consistency

The score then maps to a gem level:

0–20%   = Rough Stone
21–40%  = Clouded Gem
41–60%  = Cut Gem
61–80%  = Polished Gem
81–100% = Radiant Gem

This gives users a simple emotional signal for how their season is going without making the app feel harsh or guilt-based.

Challenges I faced

One of the biggest challenges was connecting the Next.js application to AWS Aurora PostgreSQL through Prisma. I ran into database networking issues, security group configuration problems, environment variable confusion, Prisma migration errors, and deployment concerns. Fixing those problems taught me more about real cloud development than just building a frontend would have.

Another challenge was scope. Becoming could easily become a huge product with authentication, payments, health integrations, social features, calendar sync, advanced analytics, and AI coaching. For this hackathon version, I focused on the core product loop:

Yearly Vision
→ Season
→ Daily Check-In
→ Dashboard
→ Wrapped Recap

That helped me keep the project focused while still making it feel like the foundation of a real startup product.

What I learned

This project helped me learn more than just how to generate UI quickly. I learned how to think through product requirements, user journeys, database schema design, AWS database setup, Prisma migrations, environment variables, full-stack architecture, deployment, and scoring logic.

It also helped me change how I use AI while building. Instead of only asking AI to create code for me, I used this project as a way to slow down and understand the stack: how Next.js routes work, how components connect, how the database schema maps to the product, how Prisma talks to Aurora, and how dashboard data is calculated.

The biggest lesson was that a good product is not just a list of features. It needs a clear emotional idea. For Becoming, that idea is helping people see the story of who they are becoming over time.

What’s next

After the hackathon, I want to keep building Becoming as a real product instead of leaving it as a one-time submission. The next steps include:

  • Adding user authentication
  • Making onboarding fully database-backed
  • Improving the daily check-in flow
  • Adding multi-season history
  • Building a full Your Year of Becoming recap
  • Adding better charts and analytics
  • Creating shareable recap cards
  • Adding goal templates
  • Moving the long-term backend to Supabase PostgreSQL to reduce cost
  • Continuing to polish the product as a real startup-style personal dashboard

The long-term vision is for Becoming to become a personal operating system for growth: a place where users can plan their year, live their seasons, and reflect on the person they are becoming.

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