Managing 4 cats with chronic illnesses led me to build an app to handle it.
I built Everkin (everkin.io) on iOS to understand my pet’s health, not just the last week but the last years. Managing chronic illnesses is as much about what happening now as it is what happened the last few years.
A little about me, I have been software engineer for almost 2 decades. I have 4 wonderful cats, a pair of older siblings (13y) and a pair of younger siblings (2y). From the very first week of my adopted little kittens 13 years ago I have been thrust into the world of chronic pet illnesses. I have baffled vet after vet for years until we finally started putting pieces together.
I have to deal with primary doctors, specialists, surgeons, dermatologists and insurance paperwork (pet insurance saved me so many times). Along with trying to monitor symptoms constantly. The littlest thing: loose bowel movement, lethargy, scratching, anxiety, all these I was just either keeping in my head or writing apple notes.
I often have to track glucose for one cat in remission but on steroids, track ear cleaning for the other who someone always has dirty yeasty ears, im tracking unusual litterbox routines for one who has FIC (which is a bladder flare up causing bloody urine),
I sat here a year ago brainstorming things to work on, while a pile of vet paperwork sat next to me, which was the lightbulb moment. The crux of the idea is I want to track data points for all my pets, visualize those over time, and see if there is any correlation. When you walk into a vet office and they ask you the usual questions they tend to end with “Anything else?”. In which I try to remember my script or find my notes. Everkin seeks to help in this situation by acting like your pet second brain.
A few things that were important to me:
- Multiple pet support
- Family sharing, all this data should be viewable and editable by anyone I invite to my household
- I want to export my data anytime to CSV
- Tracking glucose, weight, symptoms, bathroom habits, feedings, seizures
- Caregivers: when I am out of town I get really nervous, I want anyone taking care of my pets to have access to their basic data, any emergency vets, notes I give them for medicine and eating instructions, and for them to have the ability to do a checkin with images. So I can see things like: The morning person fed them, played with them, skipped water refills, and cleaned the litter box.
- Poor signal/offline support. Why do vet offices always have terrible signal reception?
Everkin is available on iOS for iPhone right now with other platforms in the works (First class iPad support is coming, its just tricky and needs to be done right, not quick).
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Tech Stuff:
I built Everkin using native Swift on iOS and Everkin Cloud on Google Cloud, and as a backend engineer for my entire career this was such a fun and fascinating project. I definitely want to get a little bit more into the technical side of it, how it works, how I moderate images for bad actors, observability etc. If that’s interesting to anyone let me know. This has been my life for the past year, every free moment I had I poured my soul into this. There are more "smart" insights coming, especially around handling years of paperwork, that I am very excited to get working on.
The API is built using Go, which is my second project using it and I gotta say I really love it. I had mostly been a python dev for years but with Go it just seems so much easier and less faulty than running say FastAPI or Litestar for the API. I really enjoyed working with it and will continue for future projects.
iOS: I built this using native Swift, SwiftUI and Swift Data. Now was this this best choice? Ehhhh, yes? The idea behind working natively was to have more control over the app and use the newest and coolest features, but it was a pain to understand how to properly build the data layer, interact with the API, keep things in sync with swift data.
GCP: Originally I was on Render, moved to AWS and landed on GCP. I couldn't be happier, GCP has been a great platform made even better with Terraform managing infra as code. (side note, if you are building APIs on a cloud provider use terraform from the beginning, it will save you so much time, im blown away by it. I was hesitant to use it for months due to introducing any more tech layers to this project)