Our daughter set the pace for the entire year. Even before her birth! We needed to prepare for her arrival. It turns out that babies don’t take up much space, so our 1-bedroom apartment was fine for the year. But kids require lots of support items, so we needed to buy and install storage. This consumed much of my free time from January until her birth in May.

We bought a ton of furniture from Ikea, assembled the furniture over the course of a few weeks, got a bunch of freebies from “buy nothing” groups on Facebook, got some more donations from my sister-in-law, did a deep cleaning, read books, and I’m sure a ton of other things that I’m forgetting.

The actual birth went smoothly. We had already been a few days prior: my wife had contractions so we went to the hospital. They told us that she was having contractions but she wasn’t ready yet.

The day before the birth, my wife experienced discomfort and pain all day. She insisted up and down that she was not having contractions. Finally around 11pm, she was in pretty constant pain. I set up a Google Form with a single button, “I’m feeling it now,” and I had her click it whenever she felt the sensation. I looked through a few rows of the spreadsheet and saw that she was having contractions every 3-5 minutes and we called a car to take us to the hospital.

Birth went smoothly. Doctors were great. I’m embarrassed to admit that when I saw her little head for the first time, I thought to myself “Holy shit! There’s a PERSON in there.” Obviously I knew that! I saw all the scans. I saw my wife’s belly. But the reality of seeing a new human being screaming and crying on your wife’s chest in bewilderment really drives the point home.

And then they plopped her on my wife’s chest and the baby started screaming. I remember reaching my hand down and resting my hand against her little back to comfort her. She was so upset from the birth. I knew so little about her experience that I didn’t know what would help.

The beginning was a struggle. Feeding was a struggle, swaddling was a struggle. The sleep deprivation was abominable. She’d sleep soundly all day and then scream for 6 hours in a row. But it was my daughter, so I just loved her and rolled with it.

Recovery care is absolutely baffling to me. They encourage you to get as much sleep as possible. But your baby wants to be fed every 1 to 3 hours around the clock. She doesn’t know what day and night are. You also haven’t worked out feeding yet with your baby, so she’s angry and screaming around the clock because she’s hungry. So your sleep is already ruined. On top of that, a nonstop parade of nurses and doctors come into your room with no coordination, robbing you of what little sleep you might otherwise get. I’ve had problems with insomnia my whole life. I’m an extremely light sleeper and I have trouble getting back to sleep when I’m awoken. However I literally fell asleep in the middle of a conversation with a nurse.

At one point, I wanted my wife to get 3 consecutive hours of sleep for the first time in 3 days, so I coordinated with the nurses to put our child in the nursey for the first time and don’t send anyone into the room. Then I went for a walk and thought to myself, “I’ll just get coffee at the first place that I see.” And then I walked past a Blank Coffee and thought to myself, “I’ll just get coffee at the second place that I see.”

I do want to credit the nursing staff with showing us the fundamentals of taking care of a baby. Their tips on feeding were helpful, and walking through swaddling and dealing with diapers with nurses was really helpful. I just wish they either (a) cared whether you got sleep, or (b) stop suggesting that rest was important. Telling us that we should sleep and then preventing us from sleeping was infuriating.

My wife’s mother stayed at an AirBNB for over a month to help us, and her help was crucial. She arrived fresh between 6am and 7am and held the baby, which allowed us to get an extra hour or two of sleep a day that we otherwise would not have. This made a huge difference in our morale and effectiveness. Having healthy home-cooked meals every day was a tremendous help. My wife and I each got 2ish nights in the AirBNB so that we could try to catch up on sleep (but our sleep schedule was so obliterated by that point that we still didn’t sleep that well).

I took 6 weeks off in the beginning. I’m using the remainder of my parental leave now. I’m so grateful that I have the time to appropriately bond with my child. It’s wild that our laws don’t ensure some minimum time of parental leave. 6 weeks barely felt like enough, I can’t imagine the women that have to return after a few days (or even a few weeks) still healing from literal physical trauma of birth or c-section delivery.

And I love my child so much. She’s so smiley and loves babbling with me and my wife. Her laugh heals me. Seeing her develop small new skills and capabilities makes me so proud of her. Sure there are bad parts. She cries sometimes, she gets sick sometimes, she sleeps badly sometimes, she’s destructive sometimes. But she calms down, gets better, learns how to sleep again, and things are just things. She’s wonderful. I’m truly in a new phase of life.

Learning how to interview and finding a new job

When I found out my wife was pregnant last year, I was at the end of a 2 year period of working for myself. I was having fun and the business had some income, but even without the baby I probably would have cut it off at that point. It was a no-brainer with the kid: I needed to find a real job again.

So at the end of the year I hit Leetcode, polished my interview skills, updated my resume, started applying for jobs, and found WOW THIS IS A REALLY BAD TIME TO APPLY FOR JOBS! It was at the same time that all of the FAANG companies were laying people off. So every company was flooded with more high-quality leads than they’ve had for a while. Or maybe ever had!

I also discovered that if you tell a recruiter that you have a child on the way, they don’t reply to your emails anymore. I wanted to be up-front about this, but quickly learned that I needed to wait until I had an offer letter in hand before mentioning it for the first time.

I still managed to get some interviews, and bombed a few interviews before I realized that my interview skills were out of date.

For a very long time, many companies copied how Google interviewed. Google likes hiring generalists (and when they say “generalist” they mean “people who know the specific skills that are taught in a 4 year undergrad computer science program”), so they set algorithmic coding challenges that you can complete in any language. I mainlined coding challenges when I was in college and got pretty good at them. Plus, I worked at Google for 4 years, and asked hundreds of interview questions in this style. So I’ve always interviewed on the assumption that the coding challenges were enough. This served me well from 2007 until 2016, when was the last time I had interviewed.

I was dismayed to discover that smaller companies in 2023 hire specialists! Maybe many did before this too. But most of the small companies I interviewed at before 2016 did the Google-style interview questions. They don’t want you to ramp up on their tech stack as a strong generalist. They want you to know their stack and hit the ground running as an expert. This is probably what they should have been doing all along (and again, I’m sure many companies did this all along). But I never ran into it, even interviewing for startups previously.

I had a few failed interviews. One was for a tech reason: I interviewed for an editor startup and did well on their generalist problems, but bombed the React coding exercise. I’ve never worked professionally with React in any meaningful way. Google Docs’ stack predates React and they wouldn’t have used it anyway, and Etsy forbade React on their buyer frontend until around 2020 because of the performance hit. I made some progress on the problem but didn’t get far enough, and they wanted their tech lead to come in as a React frontend expert. Fair enough!

I interviewed with Notion, and the guy asked me to design the database schema for a calendar app. Historically, I design database schemas using my patented 3 step process: first, I draw a few schemas that feel wrong. Then, I put the work aside for a bit and help teammates or go for a walk or go to lunch. Then, I come back to the problem a few hours later or the next day and discover that my subconscious made some progress on the problem. Maybe I need to iterate again but I’m much closer than I was a few hours ago.

This is an insanely bad approach for an interview, where you need to bang out a plausible schema within 45 minutes. Usually it took me at least 4 hours, sometimes over a day! I had some additional communication problems with this guy; to shortcut the discovery I asked if the app was like Google Calendar. I then probably burned 10 minutes of the interview designing with Google Calendar in mind only for the guy to keep telling me, “no, it’s simpler than that” until by the end of the interview I was ready to scream, “why didn’t you just say <<no, it’s not like Google Calendar, you’re basically designing a digital wall calendar with shareable meetings>>?” But I wouldn’t have gotten a good database design by the end of that interview anyways, so it’s not like the time made the difference.

After these 2 interviews, I regrouped and realized that I would need to pick the set of skills I wanted to work with and double down on them. I focused on polishing my interview skills for different types of technologies: pub/sub frameworks, different database technologies and their common design techniques and their tradeoffs, microservices vs monoliths, etc. For the previous few years I had mostly worked with Golang and cloud-managed Kubernetes, and was very API-heavy. So I looked for roles that satisfied that. When I got an interview with Hinge, I had no problem clearing their bar because I knew their stack and could talk comfortably about all layers of it.

Working for Hinge has been pretty great. It’s a growing company under Match Group, which is a little weird sometimes (I’m not always sure what to respond when I talk to vendors or insurers and they ask, “what company do you work for?” because the correct answer can be either). But my immediate team is full of sharp hard-working people. Our manager is really thoughtful about constructing good meetings, and he has warmed even my Grinch-like “we don’t need any meetings” heart. And they seem happy with my work; I’m going to be a tech lead next year even though I spent a good chunk of this year on parental leave.

And no time for anything else

Work and family take up almost all my time now! Sometimes I find some time to play video games, but not as much as I would like. I’m often too tired to read at the end of the day. My wife and I took like a 4 month break from watching any TV series together because the logistics and timing were just too complicated.

Part of that is the complications of living in a 1 bedroom apartment. Whenever the baby sleeps, we basically need to stop moving and be quiet. I bought it 7 years ago, so moving isn’t as easy as just renting a new place. Our building is getting heat pumps installed soon (“probably by November,” we were promised last year), and whenever that project is finished we will sell this place and buy a larger place. We thought about moving earlier, but babies don’t make a lot of space and I didn’t want to sell with a large construction project looming. Plus so few things are on the market right now because of interest rates. So this year, we will be going through the hell of selling this apartment, buying a new apartment, and moving into a larger space.

And that’s about all! For 2024 obviously parenting will continue to be my primary project. I want to shake off this dad bod that I’ve accumulated, and we will be moving into a larger space.