DoggyDex

Context:

My wife and I started offering pet sitting services in Sydney and scaled quickly: over 50 boarding services delivered to 30+ customers in under six months. As demand grew, operational friction started to appear in our intake and onboarding process.

Problem:

For each new pet, Pawshake required us to collect detailed behavioural and care information (feeding routines, walks, special needs). The platform suggested using a static PDF to be manually filled and shared with pet owners. This created multiple issues: high friction for owners, manual data entry and poor reusability of information for recurring customers

Initial Solution (MVP v0)

We introduced a Google Form to simplify data collection and centralise responses in a spreadsheet. This significantly reduced onboarding friction and allowed us to reuse pet data for repeat bookings. However, as the number of customers increased, the spreadsheet became harder to navigate and unreliable in time-sensitive situations.

Final MVP:

I designed and built DoggyDex, a lightweight Progressive Web App (PWA) that allows us to quickly access and manage pet information during boarding services. My key goals were: fast access to critical pet data, mobile-first experience and simple data model optimised for real usage scenarios.

DoggyDex acts as a personal “pet profile system” for active pet sitters.

Technical Details:

►Back End: Python (FastAPI/Uvicorn)

►Front End: HTML/JS (Bootstrap)

►UI Inspiration: Pokedex Design System (Ricardo Shiniegoski)

►Tech Architecture: This project uses a decoupled architecture where Google Sheets act as a lightweight CMS, data is materialized into static JSON via a scheduled ingestion process, served through a stateless FastAPI backend,  consumed by a PWA frontend using a network-first strategy with offline cache fallback.