Software born from a breeding notebook

What the notebook does very well

This is not about mocking the breeding notebook. A bloodline, a laying date, a ring number, a note taken in the aviary and copied out that evening: it is the most reliable tool there is. It never breaks down, it asks for no password, it loses nothing.

It has a single flaw, and it was the one in front of me: you do not search a notebook, you leaf through it. Finding out whether two birds are related, tracking down last year’s clutch, understanding why one season went less well than another, all of it is paid for in evenings spent turning back the pages.

Why another piece of software

I am a developer and an engineer. Looking at what already existed for bird breeders, I found cobbled-together spreadsheets, software abandoned years ago, or tools covering a single aspect of breeding. Nothing that held it all together: birds, pairs, eggs, health, pedigree and accounts, in an interface you can open without a manual.

So I spent a year building it before opening it to the public. A year writing, showing it to my father, and starting over, because a breeder does not think like a developer. That collaboration is why the application talks about foster pairs, rings in your federation’s format and inbreeding, rather than records and fields.

Today

AviarySoft receives regular, substantial updates. Each one starts from the feedback of the breeders who use it, and often from my father’s remarks, as he remains the first to say when something does not match the reality of the aviary.