The Origin: A Canine Pokédex

It all started with a simple idea: what if there was a Pokédex exclusively for dogs?

Since I love them and constantly look at every dog walking past on the street, I jumped right into building it without overthinking. I wanted a website to register breeds, upload photos, and rate their stats (energy, fluffiness, bark power). And just like that, Perretex was born.

Core Application Screens

To understand the Perretex user experience, the interface is split into key screens designed to make dog-spotting intuitive and fun:

1. Main Feed with Filters and Sorting

This is the main home screen and primary reference view of the app. It displays the feed of dogs logged by the community, offering fast filtering by breed, sorting by date or popularity, and quick navigation across recent sightings.

2. Dog Profile

Every uploaded dog gets its dedicated profile card (such as Charlie the Chihuahua). It features a photo carousel, physical attributes like weight and age, encounter notes, and information about the user who discovered it.

3. Breed Collection (Unlock Progress)

Functions just like a classic Pokédex or sticker album. It tracks total discovered breeds relative to the full catalog (e.g., 82 out of 199 breeds). Discovered breeds are highlighted in full color with photo counters, while undiscovered breeds remain grayed out, encouraging users to spot new breeds.

4. Breed Details

Tapping on any breed opens its comprehensive encyclopedia page (such as the Japanese Akita). It shows the official reference photo, community-submitted photo galleries, and visual badge cards detailing key stats: weight, height, lifespan, energy level, temperament, coat type, origin, and original purpose.

5. Community Page

The social hub of Perretex. It displays global app metrics (total users, likes, and cataloged breeds) along with a discoverers leaderboard, where community members friendly compete to see who has spotted the most dogs and unlocked the most breeds.

What I Learned Building It

Passion projects are often the best teachers. While Perretex looked simple from the outside, under the hood it became a hands-on lab that taught me two key architectural skills:

• Image management and saving: Photos taken from modern phones easily weigh 4 to 5 MB. If you store and serve them directly, page loads slow to a crawl. To fix this, I built an automated pipeline that strips EXIF metadata (protecting privacy by removing GPS coordinates), resizes the images, and converts them on-the-fly to lightweight WebP files—turning multi-megabyte uploads into neat ~80 KB assets.
• Databases: Early on, I stored records in basic file structures. But as soon as I needed to filter by breed, sort, and query dogs in milliseconds, I migrated to a clean relational database with strategic indexes and global caching.

The Joy of Not Monetizing

The project evolved naturally and remains alive and fully functional to this day. Practically speaking, I am the main person using it to share dogs with friends.

Over time, people have pitched me plenty of ideas to monetize it (subscriptions, pet food sponsorships, etc.), but I haven't pursued any of them because that was never the goal. When you force a hobby into a business, you often lose the magic and inherit unnecessary stress.

Perretex remains a free, personal, and functional tool sitting right there at perretex.com, doing exactly what it was built to do while keeping the journey fun.