2025.Q3 Reflection

Date: 2025-10-03 | reflect | reflections |

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In 2025.Q3, I went back to work after having a child, child turned 3 months, I barely built anything, I went outside more, and realized kids are expensive.

  • High: Baby doing well! (Happiness)
  • Low: Not as much time for projects and other fun things (Create)
  • Seed: Back up to speed at work (Profit)

Top releases:

Top Shares:

Create

Build

Not building much. The primary reasons are:

  • Having a child - Being a dad requires a lot of active work each day and forced me to rearrange my schedule, in particular my sleep schedule. This just leaves less time to do other things so my Build bucket has shrunk accordingly.
  • Ramping up at new job - New jobs take more effort because I have to ramp up on all the technologies, customs, and biz incentives. So working a bit extra there.

I hope to get back into it but might be a few months (if ever) before I get back to the time allocations I had before. I was playing with Claude Code and AI generation for a few weeks there and plan to lean into that to try and push some side projects forward in my spare time.

I relaunched HAMY.SHOP to explore a new offering to ~zero success but it costs me nothing to run so will leave it up for now.

Profit

I've now been working at Vanta for about 6 months.

Things have gone well and I've survived my back-to-work-with-a-baby trials so approaching smth of a steady state now.

A few things I appreciate about the new gig:

  • Remote-first - Very helpful so I can minimize time away from home and be available if my wife or the baby needs me.
  • Small enough to ship fast and large - We ship pretty quickly which is smth I value. Big Tech has a lot of perks but shipping quickly was not one of them IME.
  • Cares about code quality - While we ship quickly, I've been impressed by how much importance and investment has been allocated to code improvements. I've been working on a workstream to improve the testability of our code and it's been nice to see the scope of projects we're shipping.

I've also been on two offsites with Vanta - one with my team in Boston and another with all of Engineering in Dallas. It was cool to meet my team and people I worked with in person. At Rippling there were people on my team I never met.

Going back to work with a baby was hard. I deferred my leave and only took 2 weeks off but I would probably recommend new dads take at least 4-6 weeks right after birth because I was a husk of a human those few weeks - present but nothing really going on behind the eyes.

Share

Shares are in a similar boat as Builds. I just haven't had the same level of time / energy to devote to them as I had before the child.

Views and subs are down because I've shared less but still getting a decent number of hits from my old shares because they're largely evergreen. This does mean I'll miss my quarter and year goals for Shares but I think that's okay as my values / constraints have shifted.

I'm still keeping a steady rhythm with these because they are typically smaller projects, take less mental effort, and I'm able to push them forward in asynchronous chunks.

I also hit 5k subs! At the start of my channel, I figured getting 10k would be the definition of "making it" so we're ab halfway there. In reality, subs are mostly meaningless wrt views you get from the YouTube algorithm but still a fun vanity metric.

Reflect

Health

Health is improving, mostly because my sleep is improving.

Baby is sleeping longer hours. Initially it was waking up every 2-3h all day. Then closer to 4h at night. Now we can often get a stretch of 5-6h.

We were doing sleep shifts to stay sane in those early weeks as she woke up so often but now that she wakes up less often, we've shifted to my wife taking the full night shift and I do nights and weekends. We'll swap this in January when she goes back to work.

With more sleep comes more energy so I've been getting back into exercising more. Not up to where I was earlier this year but at a sustainable place I'm happy with.

One thing we've started doing that I'd like to continue is running then meeting up with wife / child on the route to finish the walk together. We do this in the mornings a few days a week and baby loves looking at the sky / trees.

Wealth

Stats:

Finances are doing okay since both my wife and I are currently employed. She jokes a lot that I've been unemployed for ~30% of the last couple years which is more true than not so having two incomes is nice.

That said, we're no longer DINKs (Double Income No Kids) and kids are kinda expensive. The bare necessities have costs of course but what's been really driving up the prices is the big purchases - things like strollers, carriers, carseats, toys, etc.

A lot of this can be purchased second hand at steep discounts but there are a few things we've decided to buy new and those were expensive. Plus some babies just don't like what you've bought so there've been a few returns / double ups of big purchases because baby didn't like it.

I do have to say that I am very grateful to my past self for being so diligent about finances. I always believed that taking it seriously and building a strong foundation would pay dividends and I'm now at the point where I can definitively say it does. That hard work is allowing me to stress less at a time when I have plenty of other things to stress about.

My wealth system remains the same: The Simple (, Long, Short, Boring, Probable) Path to Wealth.

Though I have been making a few stock picks when I feel the time is right. Like Tylenol, I think Tylenol is here to stick around.

Happiness

We've been in Atlanta the past few months to help with the baby. Both my wife and I's parents live here so it made sense for the baby.

It's generally been great:

  • More family time
  • More time outside in nature
  • More space so can sleep in my own room and not get woken up at night

Plus babies are kinda fun. Yeah they're a lot of work but it's generally fulfilling.

Observe

Connect

We've been a bit busy with the baby so haven't been hanging out much with people. Mostly family and a few friends here and there when we get a chance.

Hoping that as the baby gets older we can get out more, though I also hear it gets a lot harder when they start walking / yelling everywhere so we'll just have to see.

Explore

Been getting out of the house a lot. It helps our sanity and baby seems to enjoy being outside / looking at everything (at least for ab 20 mins before she falls asleep).

We've been walking a lot of trails, neighborhoods, and parks in the Atlanta area. Atlanta has been great for finding uncrowded nature paths in a few minutes drive. It does require a car but that's also useful for carrying all of baby's stuff.

Contumption:

  • Reading: The Wandering Inn
  • Watching: Star Wars Andor
  • Listening: Nothing. Just silence. Pure silence. And sometimes white noise to block out when baby's crying. Also baby loves this one Fisher Price song that's unfortunately stuck in my head a lot.
  • Playing: Borderlands 4 but really looking forward to Pokemon ZA

Learn

Learning to be a dad. That's enough I think.

Also been reading Learning Domain-Driven Design: Aligning Software Architecture and Business Strategy with work and that's been interesting if a bit enterprisey. I think I still prefer Domain Modeling Made Functional (aka the best DDD book I've read) but also not sure I'd necessarily pick that to share with an enterprise.

And trying to pick up tennis! We take lessons every couple weeks so not getting very good very fast but still.

Next

That's it for this quarter. For next quarter, my goal is just survive til the end of the year. If I can do that great. If I can do better than that, also great. If not, understandable.

Thanks for reading, HAMY.OUT.

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