Mill Race Reptiles

Mill Race Reptiles is my own business. I breed ball pythons in Columbus, Indiana, and I built the software it runs on and keep it running in production. That makes me both the engineer and the customer on this one, so there is no client to ask before writing it up.

It is a Custom build, not a Launch or Grow site. Those are pages published once and served as they are. This is a Django application with its own database and background jobs: a public storefront on the front and a staff portal behind a login.

The screenshots below come from a copy of the database with customer names, email addresses, prices and sale dates changed. The animals, photos and genetics in them are mine and are real.

The challenge

A breeding business keeps more records than it looks like from the outside. Every animal has its genetics, weights, feedings and parents. Every pairing has to be planned around the offspring it can produce. Buyers ask their questions through MorphMarket, the reptile marketplace I list on, and expect a quick, specific answer. At expos the selling happens at a table, not a desk. All of it has to work from a phone standing next to the racks.

What I built

The staff portal keeps a record for every animal: genetics, sale details, which feeder it eats, its lineage and a log of everything done to it. Feeding schedules turn into a daily thaw list. Breeding plans, weekly pairing suggestions and clutch records sit alongside a pairing planner that works out the genetics of a pairing before it happens.

Selling has its own tools. Listings sync to MorphMarket after a readiness check on each animal. When a buyer writes in, I type a line of guidance and the application drafts a reply from that animal’s records; I edit it and send it, and the email goes out through Amazon SES. It also writes social media captions from a photo and a short description, and checks them against Meta’s rules on animal sales. A pricing evaluator suggests a price for any gene combination from about 13,500 market listings. Sales history, supply reorders, a thermal label designer, printable QR tracking cards and a point of sale for expos round it out, with a revenue summary after each show.

The public side has the catalog of animals for sale, a page for each animal, care guides, a feeder storefront and a lookup where a buyer finds their animal again after the sale using the ID on their purchase bag.

The result

The application is live at millracereptiles.com and runs the business in one place: the records, the breeding plans, and the selling from home and at shows. The staff portal works on a phone as well as a desktop, so there is no separate app to install. When something needs to change, I change it. A Custom client gets the same arrangement: you own the software, and you talk to the engineer who built it.