Charlie Gleason, a designer and developer at Heroku and Salesforce is in conversation with two members of the non-profit Active for Good: Troy Hickerson, its co-founder, and Luke Mysse, its managing director and brand strategist. Some years ago, Troy and Luke learned about Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food, which is a powdered milk formula designed to provide vitamins and nutrients to malnourished children. Since such a simple product had the potential to help so many lives, they were inspired to find a way to increase its production and distribution. This led to them starting Active for Good. They knew that people weren't likely to make behavior changes unless there was a motivation. They decided that in order to help people get more fit, the distinguishing feature of their activity-tracking app would be to convert every minute of exercise into points, and those points into RUTF packets.
Active for Good has two types of challenges: an open public challenge, where you and your friends can try to meet a goal over the course of 30 days; and company challenges, where a company can invest in their people to encourage more movement. The aim of the app is to minimize screen time, get active, and help real people in the process. Activities aren't limited to strenuous exercise, either; housework, meditation, and other positive physical movements are also considered. Everyone from individuals to high schools to corporations have found the project useful.
Both Troy and Luke understand that changing your habits can be difficult. But they also know that it's just important to pick an activity and try it. Whether that's slowly gaining miles on a bike ride, or deciding which philanthropic project to get involved in, the most important thing is to just start doing it.
Links from this episode:118. Why Writing Matters for Engineers
117. Open Source with Jim Jagielski
116. Success From Anywhere
115. Demystifying the User Experience with Performance Monitoring
114. Beyond Root Cause Analysis in Complex Systems
113. Principles of Pragmatic Engineering
112. Managing Public Key Infrastructure within an Enterprise
111. Gift Cards for Small Businesses
110. Scaling a Bernie Meme
109. Meditation for the Curious Skeptic
108. Building Community with the Wicked CoolKit
I Was There: Stories of Production Incidents II
107. How to Write Seriously Good Software
106. Growing a Self-Funded Company
105. Event Sourcing and CQRS
104. The Evolution of Service Meshes
103. Chaos Engineering
102. Whether or Not to Repeat Yourself: DRY, DAMP, or WET
101. Cloud Native Applications
100. Math for Programmers
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