I’m always anxious about falling behind on the latest technology. While work provides opportunities to work with new stuff, it’s not always what I’m interested in. To help me keep up with ‘new’ technology I’m going to make up my own project and use it as a framework to work on stuff that interests me.

We, my family and I, volunteer with a dog rescue. We will transport dogs, foster them, interview adopters, help at events (dog wrangling), and do fund raising. Through my involvement in rescues I’ve gotten a pretty clear picture of what running a dog rescue is like. Our primary rescue is a bit of a basket case.

Any money a rescue has goes to feeding the dogs and paying for medical care. Right now, I am fostering a puppy that was hit by a car. Her leg was broken and required surgery. We had to raise money to cover the costs and she is staying with us until she if fully healed and ready to be adopted (she’ll be here for about 8 weeks). Because there is no money there isn’t much in the way of automation. Anything free is usable, but what generally happens is lots of emails and Facebook messages get bounced around. This tends to make volunteers work a lot harder than necessary.

My solution is Pet Rescue Support. I plan to build a set of applications, both web based and mobile, that will help pet rescues operate more efficiently. Luckily Microsoft provides some ‘free’ Azure support and there are other avenues through which I can get stuff to help. The apps built will be provided to rescues free of charge.

What will Pet Rescue Support do? My initial plan is to provide the following features:

• Surrender application
• Adoption Application
• Intake workflow
• Inventory management
• Volunteer Management & Communication
• Integration with PetFinder

Everything listed above is generally handled manually through email and excel workbooks.

How will rescues benefit from these services? First, email and manual processes will be reduced. Instead of having to dig through an inbox to find adoption applications, volunteers can see a list of applications. They will be able to search and sort the applications as well to make finding what they are looking for easier.

One issue we have is keeping track of all the approved adopters who have not adopted yet. We need a way to communicate with them. They need to know when and where we are having events, and do we have any dogs that might match what they are looking for.

I’ve already started working on this project. My plan is to create the applications, write about how I created them, my reasoning in the choices I’ll make (beside ‘the technology looked cool and I wanted to use it’). I also plan to release the solution as open source as I go along.

Stay tuned.