My daughter Violet was born May 22, 2026. It was a medically uncomplicated birth and she’s been a health and (relatively) happy baby since joining the family. Mom and Dad have adjusted to the “two kids” life and we’re managing sleep as best we can.
Since then I’ve been off work. The time off has had a few distinct phases: just returned from the hospital followed by the sleepy potato phase. During sleepy potato phase I spent a lot of time holding her and reading. I baked a lot. After two months, Violet started spending more of her time awake, making it a bit harder to keep her happy. I can’t believe I went back to work with Cora after two months – that’s when the hard stuff started!
I feel like with Cora’s leave I wasted the opportunity of being away from work for so long. (Why can’t I make progress any of my side projects?) I understand why better now - I’m just plain exhausted all time now! This week Violet has started daycare and I did some “faux-work” days where I’d sit down and work on the computer for a week (going through Assignment 1 of Language Modeling From Scratch). This was probably the first time in the last four months that I was able to sit and think about something for more than an hour at a time. Lesson learned: I shouldn’t expect myself to make progress on anything while taking care of a baby. It’s kind of amazing I was able to read as much as I have given how tired I’ve been. I finished 35 books during my time off (go me!).
After all this, come Tuesday I’ll be back at work. Hopefully Violet’s sleep keeps improving and I won’t have to work many days when I’ve been up since 4am holding a baby. ;-)
Thoughts on the Industry (I guess)
Work was really chaotic last year - my long-time manager left, layoffs, and all the upheaval happening in the software industry. In the last five months I’ve mostly been unplugged from the tech scene beyond browsing Hacker News during baby holding sessions. It’s been a great recipe for anxiety. (Apparently nobody writes code any more!) This week things seem better. I don’t know what the future holds for our industry but I feel confident that I’ll be able to keep finding cool things to do. (I still hate the term “AI” though.)
Earlier this year we had a package installed that had a bad transitive Python dependency tripping up the security scanner. The CVE was Windows-only (we run Linux) so we were going through the process of getting an exemption from the security team, but this paperwork is always harder than just fixing your dependency graph. Frustrated by a Slack conversation, I pulled up Rovo (Atlassian’s agent) and told it to pin the transitive dependency to a fixed version - something I’m aware is possible but I’ve forgotten the mechanics of - and Rovo did it. I believe that these tools really can remove drudge-work from our jobs and help us focus our time towards the outcomes vs slogging through the infinite rounds of refactors and framework changes that have defined the last five years of my career.
Of course, I’m skeptical about so many things adjacent to this technology. Tech companies have shown that they can’t be relied on to do the right thing. I’ve already spent too much time with team members just proxying “facts” from the chatbot. LLMs seem likely to destroy the open web. Agents will end up being platform-specific vs cross-platform; example. I don’t really understand the appeal of using a personal “agent” for life stuff, etc. This seems like another case where elements of our popular culture will be crystalized in amber. We are going to will lose significant things that made tech a decent place to work as we remove the entry-points for junior developers. I could keep going.
For now I’m going to stay agnostic. After reading GEB in college, I felt confident that a machine would never be able to pass the Turing test. I was a skeptic at work for a really long time as the LLM bots pointed out obvious lint errors. Now I’m able to talk to a window in my computer; it points out my bugs, helps with my math argument, makes my job easier at work. So, I was wrong.
Coding agents are going to change how I work - but my job has always been changing, and I’ve never been hired for a job that years later I could get again, entirely unchanged. I’m hopeful for the future but also a little sad.