Back at the start of January, our family welcomed Caspian into the world. One of the perks of working at Microsoft is the awesome paternity leave benefit, and for this baby, we decided to take it all in one go.
It's been a wild time off, with lots of things happening, but first, here's a collage of snaps of Caspian as he's grown over the last ~4 months. Little dude has more than doubled his birth weight!
Tropical Cyclone Alfred
At the start of March, we were hit by a tropical cyclone (50 years since the last one on the Gold Coast). It was Category 2, so nowhere near as bad as the worst of them, but we still had very high winds and a large amount of rainfall that caused us to lose power for 4 days. Over 300k homes across Southeast Queensland lost power too.
Thankfully, the loss of power wasn't catastrophic for us because we could just plug our appliances and sump pump into our Kia EV9.
The biggest impact post-cyclone to the Gold Coast, apart from all the fallen trees everywhere, seems to be the beach erosion.
Holiday in Yeppoon
Joelle and I seem to always romanticise living in different places, and the latest of these was the idea of moving to a small-ish town along the Queensland Capricorn Central Coast. But before any decisions could be made about relocating our lives, we first had to go visit there and see what it was like. (Spoiler: we decided the Gold Coast is perfect.) Yeppoon is even hotter (i.e., too hot) and we decided the small-town life isn't for us right now.
We had a fantastic time road-tripping though — our first road trip in an electric vehicle! It worked out pretty well since we had to stop so frequently with the kids anyway that charging wasn't too bad.
Here are a couple of snaps of our trip.
Programming Side Projects
It turns out I can't stop writing code. During this break from work, I worked on several projects — I'll keep them to one-liners here, as each likely deserves its own whole blog post.
Also, I must say, GitHub Copilot significantly lowers the barrier to working on new projects. I could not have worked on the sheer number of changes I did without AI writing >90% of the code for me. Complete game changer.
- Kids Video Player - App to play offline videos, used on our trip to Yeppoon for kids' tablets. First time developing in app in Flutter, loved it. Available on Google Play, source available on GitHub.
- AIBiblePlan.org - Tool to help Christians create dynamic Bible reading devotionals with the help of LLMs. Written in Ruby on Rails; source available on GitHub.
- FlickGPT - Tool to generate movie recommendations from LLMs. This is in early development, but you can already use your IMDb rating exports to suggest movies and TV shows! Source available on GitHub.
- SMS-an-LLM - After the cyclone, I wanted to build a free service that let you send a text message and get a response from an LLM. I ran this on an old phone for a month. Full blog post about it.
- Population Percent Visualization - Inspired by the meme of "50% of Australians live in the red area" showing a tiny amount of Australia colored in, I made a tool to dynamically change the percentage. I added US population data to the tool too. Source available on GitHub.
General Life Stuff
There was lots more that happened too. Josh (my brother) and Olivia visited, Eden visited, my parents visited, and literally all of Joelle's family visited.
We've been getting into a pretty good exercise routine too — mostly running for both of us. Joelle was already back to running 5 km at 3 months postpartum!
A fun new piece of tech I picked up recently is a Quest 3 headset, so I've been exploring the whole world of VR — even my girls have had a blast trying it out too.
(This blog post was actually written using the Quest!)
And that's about it, back to work now!
