If you look at my CV, you’ll see a PhD researcher in machine learning, a Generative AI Technologist, and a former SaaS CTO. But if you visit my home in Ballymena, you’ll find me mucking out horses, wrangling chickens, chasing my pig, and trying to keep Barry, one of my many sheep, out of trouble.
For a long time, these two worlds—the highly technical and the wildly agricultural—stayed separate. But eventually, the chaos of running a smallholding collided with my instinct as a software engineer. The result was HobbyFlock.
The Problem: Animals Are Family, Not Just Numbers
Running a small farm requires an astonishing amount of administration. You have to track feed batches, map field movements to prevent overgrazing, log veterinary visits, record worm counts, and maintain endless government compliance paperwork.
When I looked for a digital solution to replace my chaotic notebooks and Excel spreadsheets, I found that existing agricultural software was built for massive commercial mega-farms. Those apps demanded official ear-tag numbers and treated animals as profit-and-loss units.
But smallholders don’t operate like that. My animals have names, personalities, and pedigrees. I didn’t need a commercial livestock tracker; I needed an intelligent management system built by a smallholder, for smallholders.
The Solution: Building HobbyFlock
I decided to build it myself. Launched on the iOS App Store, HobbyFlock is a comprehensive React Native application designed specifically for mixed-species hobby farms.
Whether a user has a single horse, a flock of ducks, or a mixed herd of goats, pigs, and alpacas, the app centralizes their entire operation. I engineered features to handle the exact pain points I was facing in the mud every day:
- Health & Medication Tracking: Custom UI to log blood tests and worm counts (EPG), directly linked to specific medication dosages.
- Field Mapping: Visual tracking of when flocks move on and off specific pastures.
- Pedigree & Show Results: Tracking family trees and logging competition rosettes.
- Compliance Exporting: One-tap Excel exports of all animal movements and feed batch photos for government reporting.
The Tech Stack: An Exercise in AI Orchestration
Building HobbyFlock wasn’t just about solving a farming problem; it was a live case study in modern, AI-accelerated product development. As a solo founder, I acted as the lead architect, orchestrating a suite of AI tools to build, deploy, and market the app at record speed.
I utilized AI pair-programming environments to rapidly write and debug the React Native frontend and Expo build pipelines. When I needed a complex paywall and subscription infrastructure, I integrated RevenueCat, using AI to troubleshoot the race conditions and API logic.
But the automation didn’t stop at the code. To market the app, I built an autonomous workflow using agentic AI platforms. I generated promotional video avatars (including a very persuasive AI-generated Silkie chick named Lady Featherington) and utilized automated social media managers to schedule omnichannel marketing campaigns, completely hands-free.
The Takeaway
Today, HobbyFlock is a live, monetized product with a growing subscriber base. But more than that, it is a testament to the power of the modern Creative Technologist.
It proves that with the right technical architecture and AI-driven workflows, a single engineer can identify a niche real-world problem, build a robust software solution, deploy it to the App Store, and automate its marketing—all between morning feeds and evening stable duties.