while1malloc0

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.

I’ve been reevaluating what a real vacation is recently. I travel a lot, but at this phase in my life that mostly means figuring out how to childproof and do childcare in a new area. It’s not a bad thing per se, but it does require a reframing of what a vacation means, because it no longer means a time to relax and unwind. If we’re going by the definition I’m working into life now, then it’s only been a few weeks, otherwise, about 3 years or so.

One of my big life stressors was time limited, and that time expired today with everything getting done that needed to for said stressor to go away, so the week is starting our pretty well.

They got off surprisingly easy for doing so, too: https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/. The $5k they were fined amounts to roughly 14 billable hours if they’re at the NY average of $357 an hour https://www.attorneyatwork.com/solo-and-small-firm-lawyer-hourly-rates/#h-the-top-10-states-for-lawyer-hourly-rates.

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.

This is a little niche, but I have a music background, and do solfège (ie “do re mi” etc) exercises with my toddler to keep him relatively chill during diaper changes. He’s recently started mimicking them (and many other things) but doesn’t quite get that they’re syllables unto themselves, so we got this exchange:

Me: “do” Him: “do” Me: “re” Him: “re” Me: “mi” Him: “you!”

As you said, it’s exceedingly unlikely that Google would just disappear one day. AOL still exists. Yahoo still exists. These large companies don’t disappear generally, they just become shadows of their former selves and reasonably attractive acquisition targets. And in that event, there’d be ample notice for everyone to switch to alternatives. If, for the sake of argument, Google were to actually disappear immediately, it implies something very bad has happened in the world.

Somewhat similar: traveling to a county solo where you don’t speak the language. It’s simultaneously humbling and confidence building to have to figure out how to get around a place where you have to rely on kind strangers being patient with your lack of language skills.

I would recommend the Kinesis Advantage. It doesn’t use cherry switches IIRC, but they’re similar.

Just one person’s opinion, but I switched to an Apple phone last year after several years using top of the line Android devices, and I’ve been really happy with it. The features are all rock solid, and their particular brand of walled garden is one that I don’t tend to mind much.