Records, Coordinates, and Direction: Why We Record Technology

Introduction

Life is dynamic and ever-changing, which makes it difficult to predict. Even human beings, the life form humans are most interested in, are still not fully understood by humans themselves.

Naviary is a breeding center that works with the life cycle of parrots. Our essence is to raise parrots with care, support them as they breed, and then raise the new lives they bring into the world in good health before placing them in new homes.

Feeding them every day, observing their behavior, and enriching their environment may look like the same routine from the outside, but in reality no two days are ever the same. The proportions of what they ate yesterday and today are different, and the subtle change in the weight of a laid egg is different too. Noticing those tiny differences is, in fact, one of the most important parts of artificial incubation. And once the number of birds grows even a little, no person can keep all of those variables in memory.

In other words, a management style that depends only on a breeder’s intuition and memory can never scale an ecosystem properly.

Then what about the analog approach of recording everything on paper or in Excel?

It works. But because the information becomes fragmented, it does not scale well, and it takes away time breeders should be spending on observation and thinking, forcing them instead to organize data.

Naviary was founded by two breeders who worked as software engineers. We believe we can improve both this inefficiency and this uncertainty.

Records Become Coordinates, and Coordinates Become Direction

To clear away that uncertainty, we are building our own management system for the entire breeding center. And the one core value running through that system is recording.

Seen in isolation, a single record may not seem very meaningful. But when you spend time gathering those fragments, and they begin to form a story, and those stories accumulate into a library, the meaning changes.

When we plot countless points that represent changes in life and connect them densely enough, they finally become lines, and direction begins to appear. That is why we try to find the direction we should move toward through records.

Records become coordinates, and coordinates become direction.

It is the first sentence people see when they arrive at the Naviary tech blog. We are building our record system on top of this philosophy.

Why a Tech Blog?

So if we are a parrot breeding center building a system, why run a tech blog at all?

The simplest answer is this: because we want to operate transparently.

Of course, part of this may simply be my intellectual vanity and pride from having been a developer. That is why I try to write as plainly and minimally as possible.

A breeding center is not selling mass-produced goods or electronic devices. You do not need extraordinary software capabilities to raise excellent parrots and place them in good homes.

What matters most is trust. The value a customer takes from a breeding center is a companion animal they will share their life with.

The breeders at Naviary also live with two caiques as companion animals, apart from the parrots involved in breeding. When we first welcomed them into our lives, the most important question for us was the same: “Can I trust the person placing this bird with me?”

Through this archive, Naviary wants to show, transparently, both our sincerity in how we treat life and our technical approach to the systems we build.

Closing

The Naviary tech blog is not a place to show off accomplishments. It is a place to show the engineering process of trying, somehow, to understand unpredictable life and turn it into a system, even knowing that the process itself may sometimes move in the wrong direction.

These records may not be very helpful to some people, and to others they may even be something to laugh at. But we believe they may also help someone, or give someone a reason to trust us. If you resonate with Naviary’s philosophy or want to suggest a better direction, you are always welcome.

This blog is run as open source , so anyone can look at the code and use it at any time.

There may never be a perfect system. But at least in order to find a better direction than yesterday, we are going to continue running Naviary’s technical archive.

Sincerely,

Changhwan Hwang, breeder at Naviary.