gaia: My approach to pet management [old]

What is gaia?

Gaia is..or better will be.. an easy but deep software to manage your pets, targeting Reptile and Insect-Hobbyists. The idea is to have a central system to monitor your loved ones.

Why did I start with gaia?

I currently have a neat little book that contains all my infos and care-taking notes. Heck…I even published the templates for it and I love it. But it still consists of a lot of manual work that begins with checking the calendar every day, taking out the book and a pen to write in it.

I want something pretty, central and that takes all my information and more. When I take the efforts to track the feeding and weighing of my animals, I want something to process this data without having to copy all my notes into an Excel sheet. I want a central location for all my papers and certificates that come with an animal and I want a central place for all the information I gather about a species… the idea of gaia was born.

What does it do?

It keeps track of all the species I’m interested in, let’s me add information to the enclosure like temperatures, humidity, substrate and other conditions.

This leads to a list of species that I own (or want to own) with all the information I need to set up an enclosure that fits their needs.

Once I added all the species I’m interested in, I can add the animals I own to track them.

Of course I can filter by type or class of animals. In my case I’m very into geckos, snakes and insects x3

But what do I do with a list of pets I own? A simple excel file would be enoug…

I can track their habits, their feeding (response), weight and more !

The current preview is still in a very early Alpha state so don’t be shocked, that it only shows the weight graph so far! The idea is to have all information about your pet on one place and track more data in just a few clicks.

Now…I don’t want to go to my PC all the time when I feed my pet… didn’t we say that it’s already to much effort to take out a book and pen?

It comes with a mobile page of course!

The whole page got created with the “mobile first”-approach. All pages, tables and menus are optimized for phone and desktop.

What if I share a pet with my partner?

Then you’ll also like this: All pets can be shared with other people! You can add one or more people as owner of your pet and they’ll have the same access as you. (so be careful with who you share, I might add roles at some point.)

Was that it or will there be more?

Of course!! Once the foundation is done, I’ll add new features and also add support for plants, sensors, a central dashboard, home automation and so on.

Where can I get it?

It will be in private development with an upcoming closed beta for now. I’ll eventually make the code open source on my git. Later it will be available as a hosted solution online or as a container for self-hosting.

All future updates and insights will be posted on my patreon on the “Coffee to go” membership or higher. I use the money solely for justifying the time I put into this and to get new equipment for the reptile hobby soo…

If you want to help or take part on my journey Check my Patreon or mastodon from time to time or consider becoming a member to take influence on the project with access to the closed beta and feature polls!

Thank you so much for reading ❤ Love you all lots ! Alex