My father, his heart, and a breathing app

My father is anxious. He always has been.

Growing up, I didn't have a word for it. I just saw a father who would escalate quickly, flare up over nothing, and take hours to come back down. Over time, I understood it wasn't anger — it was anxiety. The anger was just the pressure valve.

And then his heart gave out.

I won't get into the details — it's not entirely my story to tell. There were hospital stays, difficult moments. The doctors were clear about the link between chronic stress and what was happening to him. Years of gritting his teeth, absorbing everything without ever releasing it — that eventually leaves a mark.

What struck me was what I found out afterward. Researching, reading, trying to understand what could have been done earlier. Cardiac coherence, guided breathing — simple, accessible, documented techniques. Five seconds in, five seconds out, for five minutes. It doesn't replace a cardiologist. But it helps you not end up needing one.

Five minutes a day to lower your heart rate, calm your nervous system, break the stress cycle before it does real damage. And nobody around me knew about these techniques. My father least of all.

The missing piece

I started looking for apps. There are dozens of them — Petit Bambou, Headspace, Calm. Well-made apps, often beautiful. But something always bothered me.

Either they were paid (a monthly subscription to breathe, really). Or you had to create an account. Or the app buries you in content: meditations, courses, eight-week programs. My father doesn't need a life coach. He needs something that helps him breathe for five minutes when he feels the pressure rising.

I looked for something simple, free, no account required, that does one thing and does it well. I didn't find it.

Three months of evenings

I'm a developer. Not an iOS developer — or at least, not back then. I'd touched Swift on a few projects, followed tutorials, tinkered around. But I'd never shipped anything on the App Store.

The idea for Souffle gave me the perfect excuse to dive in. Learn the full stack: SwiftUI, SwiftData, HealthKit, AVFoundation, CoreHaptics. Understand what it actually means to go from "it works on my simulator" to "it's on someone else's phone."

I worked evenings and weekends, with Claude Code as my pairing partner. Not in "generate me an app" mode — more like a senior friend who knows the stack inside out. I'd ask questions, we'd debate architecture, it would unblock me when I was going in circles on a HealthKit problem at 11pm. I wrote the code. It kept me from losing three hours on Stack Overflow.

Three months of that. Not full time — between work, life, the moments when motivation dips. But three months nonetheless.

Where I struggled most was design. I'm a developer, not a designer. Finding the right colors, the right spacing, the right visual hierarchy — that's a craft in itself and I understand it better now. The result isn't perfect. I know that, and I plan to improve it with each version.

But the heart of the app works. You open Souffle, you pick a program, you breathe. No account, no subscription, no data leaving your phone. Everything stays local.

My first beta tester

My father.

I put the app on his iPhone one Sunday. He looked at me with that "if it makes you happy" expression. Skeptical. Fair enough — this is a man who has never meditated in his life, who finds that kind of thing a bit out there.

The first few weeks, nothing. I didn't push it, afraid of putting him off. Then one evening he told me he'd tried it. "That flower thing." The breathing animation. He'd run the cardiac coherence session, five minutes before bed. And he'd found it "not bad."

Coming from my father, "not bad" is basically a standing ovation.

He's kept at it gradually. Not every day. Not religiously. But he comes back to it. And that's all I ever asked for.

Why I'm writing this

Souffle is on the App Store now. Free, fully functional, no ads. There are in-app purchases, but they don't unlock anything — it's just a "buy me a coffee" button for people who want to help cover costs. It's not a business plan; it's a personal project that turned into something other people can use.

If you're stressed, anxious, or just curious — try it. Five minutes. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.

And if you have someone in your life who struggles to let go of the pressure — a parent, a friend, a colleague — send them the link. Sometimes it's easier to breathe when an app guides you than when your son tells you to calm down.

Trust me, I've tried both.

— Pato

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This post is part of a series about building Souffle. The next one will cover the technical journey: from the first line of Swift to submitting to the App Store.