Dad of a toddler with another on the way (mostly mentioning it because my experience with a newborn is relatively recent in memory). A lot to unpack here. First of all, breathe. It’ll be okay.

While it certainly sounds like having a kid wasn’t what you wanted and it probably wasn’t the right decision, it’s the one you made, so the focus now should be on how best to help you, your wife, and your child.

The good news is the absolute hardest part of raising a kid, especially your first, is the newborn stage. It gets a little bit easier with every week that passes. Sleep deprivation is a bitch and frankly, I wouldn’t put too much stock in your emotions because in all likelihood, they are probably pretty out of wack right now. I remember inexplicably sobbing at 3 in the morning (while trying to get my son back to sleep) because I was so tired. It made no sense, but I was just exhausted.

As for the crying, it may not help you, but I find it helpful to recognize a baby crying for what it actually is: a communication tool. In fact, it’s the one of the only communication tools a newborn has. When they cry, they are doing their job and telling you they have a need that needs to be met. So instead of getting irritated when they cry, you basically just run through a checklist of possible things they need, and try them out until you figure out what it is they needed. Fortunately the list of things they need at this stage are pretty simple: it’s almost always food, sleep, or possibly a diaper (my son did not care one bit about dirty diapers though, heh). Sometimes it also might be something else like overstimulation. But it’s never really inexplicable and you can learn their specific cues to more quickly narrow down what they need. You can also often prevent crying by paying attention to their non-verbal communication before they start crying: e.g, a baby will do things like rooting or sticking out their tongue when they are hungry well before they start crying for food, or get pinkness around their eyes when they are tired.

You absolutely should first and foremost try to get whatever help you can get from family and friends, if you can. It helps immensely to have a support system to lean on, even if it’s something as simple as helping with cleaning or just giving you guys a break (especially important to make time for each other, too).

As for bonding, this is going to sound a bit odd, but it’s really worth trying. Something they teach you in childbirth classes is that spending extended amounts of time doing skin to skin contact with your baby (so shirt off for you, diaper only for the baby) is really valuable for bonding (even for dads), and from personal experience I can say this is true. I did it a number of times in my son’s first few weeks and it definitely made a difference. It’s basically a chemical effect on you and your baby’s brain chemistry and it is pretty powerful. It’s also the same for mothers and babies and it’s why hospitals will have mother and baby do immediate skin contact as soon as they are born. I think it really helps you appreciate what it is that you have now.

The other thing is that your relationship with your kid is something that grows with time, especially as they get older and more interactive. It takes a few months for them to start smiling and laughing at you, and honestly once they do (and you can make them laugh), it’s a game changer. It’s so much fun, and just gets more fun as they get older.

As for your wife, you may already know this, but she’s likely experiencing post-partum depression. What she’s feeling are real feelings, but likely not based on anything rational. Human brains are just weird little things. Massive hormonal changes really fucks with brain chemistry and makes a lot of new moms have really uncharacteristic mood and behavior. Her system has been flooded with all sorts of shit for the last 9 months and giving birth is where it all comes crashing down. It’s not uncommon to prescribe anti-depressants temporarily to help new moms until things start to balance out again. Also, she should really get off TikTok/Instagram. That shit is toxic as fuck and WILL make you unhappy.

And, if it helps: there’s so much garbage information out there for new parents and it’s really fucking hard to figure out what’s good advice or not. Here’s the real deal about breastfeeding: it is by no means a requirement. Not even close. Yes, it has some benefits if you can do it, and it’s worth trying. But it is massively, and I mean MASSIVELY overblown on the internet. Pumping is perfectly fine, and many mothers do it exclusively (my sister-in-law mostly did, in fact). Formula is also perfectly fine. And a baby falling asleep while eating is REALLY FUCKING NORMAL, especially after they are just born! That being said, it can be helpful to try to start a pattern of offering food as soon as they wake up, if you aren’t already, since they’ll be most alert then and more likely to get more milk that way.

Part of being a new parent is learning to tune all that stupid shit out and make decisions for your baby based solely on what your pediatrician says and your own judgement. Even your own parents’ advice should be taken with a huge grain of salt, both because their experience is very out of date (AAP recommendations have changed a lot over the years) and they can’t remember what it was actually like very well. It’s something I wish I could go back and tell our past selves.

And props to her on the milk supply, that’s no easy feat. Guard it well and try not to waste any of it, because overproduction is typically only temporary until her body adjusts to your baby’s actual needs. Always try to restock what you use as much as possible. Oh, and keep an eye out for mastitis (clogged milk ducts that get infected). It’s super easy to get in the initial period of overproduction, because the breasts are frequently fuller than the baby actually needs, and prolonged full breasts can clog easily. Mastitis can easily burn through your supply (it can make it so the baby can’t easily get milk, and it takes time to clear up with antibiotics).

Anyway, hang in there. Newborns are the hardest and it does get a lot easier and more fun/rewarding.

My son doesn’t watch it and we have no intention of starting.

Nobody sane uses vim as an IDE

True, same people use unix as their IDE and vim as the editor therein.

And, you know, most businesses aren’t open at midnight. So you’re more limited in what you can do in a day.

Also, getting a decent amount of sunlight is important, and that’s harder to do when you’re sleeping through a lot of sunlight hours.

4 is pretty early but 10:40am is also just pretty late to wake up unless you’re like, a teenager or something (or work odd hours). A lot of the day is already gone by then.

IMO it’s nicest when you can keep your waking hours relatively close to the time the sun is up.

A real nerd would know that React is a library and HTML is a markup language, and neither are programming languages.

Unix is my IDE, vim is my editor.

Yep. When everything about your IDE (unix) is programmable, it makes “modern” IDEs seem quite quaint.

Personally I make extensive use of https://f1bonacc1.github.io/process-compose/launcher/ to orchestrate a bunch of different shell scripts that trigger based on file changes (recompiling, restarting servers, re-running tests, etc.). Vim just reads from files as needed. It’s lightning fast, no bloat, and a world-class editing experience.

The director of IT at a trucking company absolutely would have power over the devices used by said company.

You’re the fucking problem. Maybe if you treated people with humanity and worked towards a common solution instead of using technology to drain people’s souls, you wouldn’t have people that hate the shit you’re slinging.

What you do makes the world a worse place to live in.

That’s simply false. Increased length increases the entropy of a password, making it harder to brute force to gain access.

You have to go out of your way to restrict the length of passwords. There’s absolutely no reason to do it, and it is contrary to all good security practices.

The world is political.

It’s just for the “last mile” where code gets packaged up into releases. There’s still thousands of developers that have all of the code on their machines as well, it’s just that their local repos aren’t the ones that end up in the hands of end users.

Changes can come from anywhere. The Linux kernel itself doesn’t use any central repository like Github, it’s instead done via emailing patches that are eventually merged into the mainline kernel repository managed by Linus.

It is 100% decentralized.

It’s not that hard, technically speaking, though of course it takes skill to come up with a set of glyphs that work well together and such.

Also, there are websites that can scan your handwriting and turn it into a font file, which is pretty cool. I have a font I created of my wife’s handwriting.

Yep. It does increasingly feel like developers like me who find it deeply disturbing and problematic for our profession and society are going to increasingly become rarer. Fewer and fewer people are going to understand how anything actually works.

https://www.visidata.org/ is way, way, way, way better than excel and it’s FOSS.

As for the rest:

• I don’t really miss Word because WYSIWYG editing is just kinda bad across the board. Much better to write with markup rather than fighting an auto-formatter all the time.
• I thankfully have not needed to make much of any PowerPoints, but I think I would probably feel similarly about them and want them in some kind of markup language as well.
• Teams just sucks ass compared to many other alternatives, though I’m admittedly not familiar with good FOSS ones
• Outlook is basically just a dinosaur and there’s a million ways to do email better. Frankly, FOSS has it beat by a huge margin

The rest of Office isn’t really even worth talking about tbh.

For excel stuff, https://www.visidata.org/ is way, way better than excel assuming the data is tabular (which, frankly, it should be anyway). Like it’s not even close.

https://www.visidata.org/

Way, way better than excel for working with tabular data. Excel is child’s play in comparison.

I’m no chef but… smoked paprika? Sounds like it could fit the bill, maybe.