Musings

I published my first fully vibe coded application: Toddler Photo Lock. It’s extremely simple: Select a photo, start Guided Access, and hand your phone to your toddler. Your kid can then view the photo without you having to worry about them doing something else on your phone.

Here’s a list of things that I wrote down about being a parent in the first few weeks. Quite a few of them I wish someone had told us before having a baby. I hope it helps!

I’ve been doing some form of “customer support” for more than the last 12 years. I started my programming journey by participating on StackOverflow, answering more than 600 questions and doing around 7,000 other actions like commenting and making edits. My first full-time tech job at GSAP required heavy involvement in the (very helpful) GSAP forums. I’ve been maintaining a fairly well used (>200k monthly) open-source web extension, Just Read, for the last 10 years. Supporting Just Read means responding to customer emails and (now over 430!) GitHub issues.

All of that is to say that while I’ve never worked full-time in customer support, I’ve done my share of it.

Recently I had my least favorite experience as a customer trying to get support from a company. That company was Thrive Market.

I recently read an article titled “The Timmy Trap”, which talks about how humans anthropomorphize LLMs and how anthropomorphizing them can often be counterproductive.

I found the article compelling overall. I was surprised to see that the Hacker News comments were mostly negative.

The only parts of Facebook that I still use are the marketplace and Buy Nothing groups. To my knowledge, there’s no better place to get rid of stuff that you own in a responsible way that provides use for someone else. I’ve probably sold or given away over 100 items in the last 7 years.

My most memorable interaction happened when I lived in Athens, Georgia. I had listed 10 or so items at the same time during a purge / cleaning. A man had messaged me about two different items: a portable speaker and some other item. When he realized I was the same seller, he said, “what else ya got” and proceeded to buy at least 5 of the items I was selling including a fuzzy blanket.