My wife and I are thrilled to announce the newest ~junior dev~ member of the family, Annie Elodie Erskine. Annie joined us on June 12th, and our lives have been full of hugs, snugs, and diaper changes ever since. I never used to buy it when people said how much my life would change once a baby came along... but now that Annie's here, I can safely say they were underselling it. Seeing this little girl look up at me and smile makes my whole day, and when she's crying there's nothing I want more than to console her. One thing I did underestimate, though, was just how much she'd sleep in those first few weeks. And boy did I use that to my advantage to cruise on some personal projects!
While Annie was sleeping (or I was sleeping and my agents kept chugging along), I was able to make the most of my time by building a myriad of solutions for myself, my family, or the community.
The first thing my family and I invested in was a way to keep track of diaper changes, feedings, etc with Annie. We employed a great mobile app called Huckleberry for this. Huckleberry is great, but they only offer a mobile app UI. With a fussy baby, or a foggy brained daddy, having access to a phone isn't always viable.
Baby Tracking
I wanted to see if there were other ways to leverage our data inside of Huckleberry. Huckleberry doesn't have a public API, so I set out to make one. You can check out the Huckleberry-js package here.
Once I had a package for interacting with huckleberry, I deployed a demo web dashboard where I could issue access tokens. These tokens allow me to interact with the Huckleberry service as if I were in the mobile application.
One of the first things I did was build an MCP capability into this library. I was able to hook this MCP up to my Home Assistant and Hermes/OpenClaw Telegram bot. This lets my wife and me log diapers or feedings from our voice devices or from a Telegram chatbot.
This past year I picked up a few Eink displays, like the TRMNL X. I created a custom plugin that consumes our data and displays key information about Annie and her last 12 hours. My wife and I leave little notes to each other, which was clutch for working the late shift.
Speaking of Eink, my Pebble Time 2 Eink smartwatch came early in my paternity leave as well. I used the same Huckleberry-js library to build a custom app to keep track of this information right from my wrist.
Time Tracking
Before I picked up the Pebble watch, I wore a simple $20 Casio F91-W digital watch. One feature of this watch was unmatched: the hourly chime. This chime made it easy to keep track of my day without looking at my wrist, and it reminded me of just how fast time moves (and to make the most of it).
Nothing like this existed in the Pebble ecosystem, so I set out to build my own version. I added in lots of custom settings, like optional vibrations, custom buzzes/sounds for hour, half-hour, start of day, end of day, daily settings, etc.
Take me out to the ballgame
Well, not for a little while, but I am very excited to share my love of baseball with Annie. In the meantime, I built an MLB score-watch app for the Pebble too. This is basically MLB Gameday, but on your wrist. It auto updates with not just live scores, but also who is up to bat and who is on base.
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On the Web
I maintain a fairly popular plugin for Craft CMS, which I have unfortunately neglected over the last few years. I just don't do much LAMP-based development any more, so working on PHP-based projects is harder and harder the further I stray from it. However, with a little help from my buddy Claude, I was able to squash some bugs, merge in some pending PRs, and create beta versions for the upcoming rewrite of Craft from Symfony to Laravel.
