How I Chose the Technology That Runs Animals First
Gerald Owens
One of the first decisions I had to make when building AnimalsFirst wasn't what features to include. It was deciding what kind of foundation I wanted to build them on. From the beginning, I knew one thing for certain: no two animal welfare organizations operate exactly alike.
Some organizations are open admission. Others are limited admission. Some operate large foster networks. Others focus heavily on animal control, community outreach, or pet licensing. Every organization develops processes that work best for its staff, volunteers, and community. Those processes also change over time as new programs are introduced and new challenges emerge.
I never wanted AnimalsFirst to be software that told organizations, "This is how you have to work." I wanted to build software that could adapt to the way you work. That decision influenced every technology choice I made.
As a developer, it's easy to focus on technical specifications, but technology is only valuable if it solves real-world problems. The foundation of AnimalsFirst needed to support incredibly complex relationships between animals, people, medical records, fosters, locations, cases, outcomes, documents, communications, and much more. Just as importantly, it needed the flexibility to grow alongside our customers instead of forcing them into a rigid structure every time they wanted to do something new.
That's why I chose MongoDB as the database behind AnimalsFirst.
While most people will never interact directly with a database, the choice of database affects almost everything you experience in the software. By using a flexible data model, we're able to introduce new features, support unique workflows, and expand the platform without constantly redesigning the underlying system. It gives us the ability to evolve the software as animal welfare evolves.
That flexibility has allowed AnimalsFirst to expand far beyond traditional shelter management. Today, the platform supports community programs, field services, foster management, mobile operations, pet licensing (through BarkPass), and many other capabilities that simply weren't part of the original vision years ago.
I also chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host AnimalsFirst.
For our customers, that means your software runs on the same cloud infrastructure trusted by organizations around the world. As your organization grows, or as we welcome more customers, we can increase capacity without asking you to purchase servers or worry about maintaining hardware. It also provides the security, backups, monitoring, and reliability that modern cloud software depends on.
Looking back, I'm incredibly happy with those decisions. The technology choices we made years ago continue to pay dividends today. They allow us to build new features faster, respond to customer feedback more quickly, strengthen security, improve performance, and support the unique ways our customers operate.
As a developer, that's ultimately what matters most to me. The technology itself isn't the goal. The goal is giving animal welfare organizations software that grows with them, adapts to their mission, and never limits what's possible.
