ColonyCare

The association’s volunteers feed and look after several cat colonies, plus the cats kept at the shelter. They needed one place to see which colonies are due a visit, how each cat is doing, and what happened to cats that were moved, adopted or went missing, and it had to be easy for volunteers of every age.

The home screen splits colonies into overdue (two days or more without a visit) and due today, with the same green, amber and red code used across the app.

A visit records cats seen, dry food, cans, notes and up to two photos. Each cat has a profile with up to three photos, health status, and an age that moves forward by itself: the API stores the age given and when, and returns today's.

Every change to a cat is logged automatically with its author: new profile, edits with old and new values, deleted photos, moves to the shelter and discharges (adopted, deceased or missing). Volunteers can ask for an AI summary of that history, cached until the data changes.

The API is a FastAPI service on PostgreSQL. Each domain module (users, colonies, visits, cats, admin) follows the same models, schemas, crud and router layout, and every response shares one { success, message, data } envelope.

Accounts start pending until an admin activates them. Sign-in works with email or Google through the browser, so it also runs inside Expo Go. The JWT carries a fingerprint of the password, so changing it signs out every other device.

In production the configuration lives in AWS Secrets Manager and the EC2 role reads it, so there are no .env files on the server. Caddy handles HTTPS, compression and request size limits, and RDS keeps automatic backups.