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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • That first month is a real challenge, so congrats on making it this far.

    I had a similar sort of feeling, that first few months (what I’ve seen called “the fourth trimester” and what I personally refer to as “the phase where they’re basically a potato”) is a bit repetitive and they don’t really have the capacity to engage. But it’s well worth the wait; months 4-12 are really exciting and filled with firsts.

    We’re at about 24 months and it’s simultaneously been the most fun and most challenging. Little guy is really taking to the verbal skills, and he’s starting to repeat full sentences (including daddy’s traffic-inspired “look at this fucking guy”) and express complex thoughts and desires. Many of those desires involve potential grievous injury, hence the difficult part, but it’s overall a lot of a fun.



  • While the study itself is a good read and I agree with the conclusions—Mastodon, and decentralized social media need better moderation tools—it’s hard to not read the Verge headline as misleading. One of the study authors gives more context here https://hachyderm.io/@det/110769470058276368. Basically most of the hits came from a large Japanese instance that no one federates with; the author even calls out that the blunt instrument most Mastodon admins use is to blanket defederate with instances hosted in Japan due to their more lax (than the US) laws around CSAM. But the headline seems to imply that there’s a giant seedy underbelly to places like mastodon.social[1] that are rife with abuse material. I suppose that’s a marketing problem of federated software in general.

    1. There is a seedy underbelly of mainstream Mastodon instances, but it’s mostly people telling you how you’re supposed to use Mastodon if you previously used Twitter.


  • Not terrible thus far. Getting over a cold and am already sick of hearing about the Twitter rebrand, but otherwise better than the past few days.

    Really starting to wish that Lemmy had a way to block entire instances. It feels silly that my choices are to either block everything labeled as NSFW (including discussions, comics, etc that aren’t necessarily sexual in nature but not appropriate for work), or have to block an endless sea of furry porn on the “All” timeline, one community at a time (no judgement, just not what I’m on Lemmy for).





  • On the one hand I’ve gotten a lot of reading time and have been enjoying my current book (Children of Time) much more than the last book I tried (The Dark Forest [yeah, I know it’s a modern classic of the genre, I just really didn’t like the translation]). On the other, I was with my wife all day in the ER because she developed a kidney infection. Everyone’s fine now though so… pretty mixed so far?


  • I’m a staff engineer with a toddler and went through (am going through?) a similar thing. At the end of the day, I’m just tired and want to veg, not necessarily try to learn something new about programming. There were a few things that helped me though:

    1. The biggest thing was just to recalibrate my expectations. I talked with other dev parents who all said that, until the kids are able to play a bit more independently (eg 6 or so), you just have to accept that your self enrichment time is going to be limited.
    2. For my off hours learning, I stick to mainly portable skills. Ways of thinking about technical debt, etc. Things that are both widely applicable, and can be learned more passively.
    3. I try to carve out time to learn during work hours. I’m lucky in that the company I work for allows for a lot of independence, so my team actually instituted an “investment day” where we work on whatever we want, with the only goal being that you should try to do something that you’ll learn from.




  • My wife and I read a bunch of books before our kid was born, and the ones worth recommending were:

    • The Happiest Baby On The Block: the techniques in here didn’t necessarily work 100% of the time to calm our son, but they worked 80% or so, and that’s a lot better than nothing
    • The Birthing Partner: I believe this is actually something of a textbook for doulas, but it’s essentially an extremely graphic look at the process of birth in many variations. Useful for not being too surprised day of
    • Expecting Better: Emily Oster’s whole deal is breaking down parenting advice with data. I recommend this one not because it tells The Thing Science Says To Do ™️, but because it basically says that there’s not actually enough data to make a decision on numbers alone for many important parenting topics, with a few notable, hopefully obvious, exceptions (eg don’t hit your kid). I found it really helpful in giving perspective to things that seem like the most important decisions we’d ever make, but that many older parents assured me we probably wouldn’t remember after our child was in school.

    Other than that, a few random tips:

    • Practice things. Swaddling, diaper changes, and car seat fastening can all be practiced on stuffed animals for scale. It’ll feel silly, but trust me that you don’t want to do it the first time when you’re exhausted from the new baby.
    • If you’re worried about diapers (like I was), take solace in the fact that baby waste doesn’t actually smell terrible for the first few months. It’s not a pleasant smell by any means, but you don’t start getting the really bad smells until you introduce solids.
    • “It takes a village” and “sleep when the baby sleeps” are truisms for a reason. If you have any support systems you’re comfortable with watching your baby for short spells, leverage them.
    • If you have any communication difficulties with your partner, now is a really good time to work on them. The first few weeks involve a decent amount of sleep deprivation for most, which puts a lot of people on edge and can lead to more fighting than usual. Having kind, consistent communication with your partner can help alleviate potential fights.






  • It’s not that it’s hard to get node code running on a remote server per se, it’s that there’s a lot of decisions to make and finicky details related to the “non-functional” parts of serving an app over the internet: getting traffic to the app, configuring multiple copies of the app, storing state, the developer experience of shipping your app from laptop to production, secrets management, etc. By and large, the differentiator of most cloud providers and “platforms as a service” is in how they approach handling those details, and there’s usually a spectrum of configurability and convenience. In general, as you add options to configure, you get less convenient, but more easily able to address more use cases.

    In general, I recommend new developers target the thing that’s most convenient, which usually means the thing with the fewest configuration options. For node apps, my go to recommendations right now are Glitch and Railway. I’ve also heard good things about Render, and Fly, but I haven’t used either personally, so can’t speak to either. Generally though, I think you’ll have an easier time looking for a platform as a service instead of targeting a cloud provider directly.