01
Websites
Product sites and the software behind them. Pages with a point of view, and tools a business can actually run.
About the studio
Creativity, then the craft to ship it.
Catharsis Devs is an in-house development company. Ideas begin here. The people who have them are the people who design them, build them, and put them in the world.
Catharsis is the release — the moment an idea stops being a private thought and becomes something you can hold, play, or run a business on.
We work across three forms. A website can be a product, not a brochure. A mobile app can feel inevitable on both platforms. A game can have a rule you remember after you close it. The through-line is taste: we decide what it should feel like before we decide how it is built.
The studio is Catharsis LLC, based in Chicago, and led by C'Aira Shields.
What we make
02
Mobile apps
iPhone and Android, often from one Kotlin codebase, so the product feels at home in either pocket.
03
Games
Original play. The rules, the feel, the art, and the round someone immediately starts over.
C'Aira Shields founded Catharsis Devs after nearly nine years as an engineer. The work has always been the same kind of problem: take something people should love using, and make the software worthy of it.
The first role was at RadioPublic, shipping features for podcasters and leading that app's move from Java to Kotlin. World Wide Technology came next, building internal Android products and consulting apps. At Bleacher Report, part of Warner Bros. Discovery, the role grew from Android engineer to senior engineer — mentoring across product, design, and engineering, and shipping features for a product with a massive audience. In 2023 that work was named Most Valuable Engineer. Those years also included Underdog Sports.
That practice is now the studio. Android and Kotlin are home ground. Compose Multiplatform carries several of the mobile products. The web products are built with Next.js and TypeScript. Games, including Blockboom Adventure, are built in Unity. The range is deliberate. An idea gets the form it actually needs.
The studio is based in Chicago. It builds its own products, and the door is open if you want to talk about one of them.
Write to the studio