Sittella Studio
Sittella Studio makes digital products with genuine depth, built carefully from the inside out by someone who uses them too. Started on Wonnarua Country, NSW, by Jess Jones - one person who got tired of waiting for the right thing to exist.
About
I'm Jess Jones - autistic developer, someone newly deep in the world of IFS, and the person behind DotJess and now this.
The name has two origins and I love both of them.
The Varied Sittella is a small Australian bird that forages head-first down tree trunks while every other bird climbs up. Compact, social, quietly going against the grain. The other Sitella is a woman I met on the street years ago. She was homeless, carrying everything she owned, and one of the most unexpectedly present people I've encountered. I helped her when I could. I never forgot her name. When I was looking for a name for this studio and landed on the bird, I realised I already knew someone called that. Some names find you twice.
That's what Sittella means to me. Something that moves in its own direction, and something that shows up in your life when you're paying attention.
Being autistic shapes how I build. The obsessive internal consistency, the refusal to let something ship when a detail is wrong, the deep investment in getting the invisible parts right. The studio is small by design. Small means every decision gets made carefully.
Philosophy
"Software should feel like it knows you're there."
There's a particular kind of app that's technically impressive and completely empty. You open it, it functions, you close it feeling nothing. I've used hundreds of them.
I build from the other end of that problem. Start with the person, what they're actually carrying, what this moment in their day costs them, and work outward from there. Technology is the last decision.
For neurodivergent users, and I'm one of them, this matters concretely. A lot of wellness software assumes a particular interior architecture. Specific entry points, specific metaphors, a particular relationship between the body and the mind. When those assumptions miss, the whole thing misses. Sittella builds for how people actually are.
I came to IFS recently, the way a lot of autistic people do - it kept coming up in community spaces, recommended by people who'd found it genuinely useful for understanding themselves. So I started looking into it.
What I found was a framework that made a lot of sense to me. The idea that the different, sometimes contradictory parts of how you feel and behave aren't problems to fix but characters with their own histories and reasons - that landed. What didn't land as easily were the tools available to explore it. They felt a bit clinical, a bit distant, hard to connect with. I wanted something warmer, something that felt more like a real conversation. So I built Cora.
An IFS therapeutic companion built by someone who wanted something easier to connect with - warm, curious, and genuinely present. Cora is informed by IFS from the ground up and built with neurodivergent users genuinely in mind, woven into the architecture, not bolted on at the end.
Free to start · $7.99 AUD / month · $81.99 AUD / year
Therapists curious about Cora, neurodivergent developers who want to compare notes, people who've been waiting for something like this, people who just have something to say. All welcome. I read everything and reply to most of it.
Acknowledgement of Country
I acknowledge the Wonnarua people, the Traditional Custodians of the land where I live and work. Everything I have is because of what they lost. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people here today. I honour neurodivergent people across all communities and commit to care, inclusion, and a better forever for us all.