I Put My Son in a Swamp

I Put My Son in a Swamp | Neil HanlonSkip to content ~/posts I Put My Son in a Swamp I modeled my newborn as a typed resource with a sync method and a stack of reports. It's the newest of five ways I track one baby, and somewhere in the absurdity there's a real reason two exhausted people instrument everything. July 11, 2026 6 min read

My son is a typed resource now. He has a sync method that pulls the last seven days of his life into a versioned snapshot, a stack of reports that summarize how he slept and ate, and — I did think about this — a delete that’s careful to be idempotent, because deleting the same diaper twice shouldn’t be an error. I did not set out to put a baby in a swamp. It followed, the way these things do, from having already put everything else in one. What “in a swamp” means swamp models real resources as typed objects with methods, and records every run as versioned data other models can read. You write extensions in TypeScript. I used it last week to automate my home certificate authority, and the whole time I kept thinking about the thing I actually spend all night dealing with, which is not a certificate. We run Baby Buddy at home — a small, self-hosted app for tracking a newborn’s feedings, diapers, sleep, pumping, meds. It has a clean REST API. A clean REST API, at 2am, to a certain kind of brain, is a dare. So I wrote @kneel/babybuddy: one model that reads the whole instance into a snapshot and writes new entries back, with a stack of reports that run over the snapshot. Log a feeding, fix a mis-logged one, patch a bad timestamp, then ask it questions. The reports tell on you Summarizing a week of a newborn produces numbers that are, on their own, a little unhinged. In the last seven days: ninety-six feedings. Sixty-five separate sleep sessions. His longest unbroken stretch was four hours and forty-six minutes, which I know to the minute because there’s a report called sleep-longest-stretch and I run it the way other people check the weather. The one that got me was the medication report. I built it to answer “are we giving the vitamin D on schedule,” and it answered a question I hadn’t asked, which is “when does Neil actually remember the vitamin D.” Not on schedule, it turns out. It’s a little cluster of timestamps at midnight, 2am, 3am — whenever I surfaced enough to think of it. The schedule in my head and the schedule in the database were not the same schedule, and only one of them keeps records. That’s the actual value of instrumenting anything: some night the dashboard hands you back a picture of yourself you weren’t planning to volunteer. This isn’t the first interface. It’s the fifth. Here’s the genuinely stupid part, and I say that with affection for the man who did it: the swamp extension is the newest way I have to track this kid, not the only one, and not by a wide margin. There’s a mobile app — a Capacitor wrapper around Baby Buddy with the sharp edges filed down. Biometric lock, so a phone left on the couch doesn’t show the whole night’s log. Log-a-diaper you can say out loud, because your hands are full, because your hands are always full. A running feed timer on the lock screen next to the elapsed time you’re trying not to look at. iOS and Android, because of course iOS and Android. There’s a Pebble watchapp , because the best possible interface for logging a feed at 3am is a physical button on your wrist that emits about four photons. Start a timer, stop it, pick the amount, done, without the wake-your-whole-nervous- system glare of a phone. I’ll admit the watchapp is currently ahead of my hardware — I don’t have the watch yet. There’s a ring interface too. I don’t have the ring yet either. I wrote software for two devices I’m still waiting on, which tells you roughly everything about the state of mind here. There’s a conversational server — an MCP that lets me, or Claude, or the voice assistant it hangs off of, just say what happened. “He ate ninety at eleven.” It writes the same feeding record the app would, the same one the watch would, the same one the swamp model syncs back out. And there’s Home Assistant , the layer that nags. At 10:30 it reminds whoever’s still upright to make the overnight bottle. At 11 it reminds us the vitamin D goes in it. If nobody acknowledges, it asks again. It’s a very polite robot with a clipboard, and right now it has a better memory than either of us. None of these sit on a stock Baby Buddy, either — the one underneath isn’t stock anymore. Somewhere in here I ended up bolting push notifications onto it via FCM, adding per-record audit fields so I can see who logged what, soft-deleting timers so a fat-fingered stop doesn’t just vanish, and writing a handful of new reports. “Track the baby” quietly became...

I Put My Son in a Swamp

Related Articles

(no title)

Scientists reverse brain aging, with a nasal spray

AI has torched the market for junior programmers

Al Vigier: Canada's AI strategy shouldn't include secret Palantir bills

The Anatomy of an AI-Native Org