Draft: I Put My Son in a Swamp

Humorous post on modeling a newborn as a swamp resource plus the wider
Baby Buddy tooling ecosystem. Marked draft: true (not for production build).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

content/posts/i-put-my-son-in-a-swamp.md

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+---
+title: "I Put My Son in a Swamp"
+description: "I modeled my newborn as a typed cloud resource — with a sync method, fifteen reports, and an idempotent delete. It is the fifth interface I have built for tracking one baby, and somewhere in the absurdity there is a real reason two sleep-deprived parents instrument everything."
+date: 2026-07-11T00:45:00-04:00
+draft: true
+categories: ['automation', 'homelab']
+tags: ['swamp', 'babybuddy', 'parenting', 'home-assistant', 'mcp', 'pebble', 'devops']
+---
+
+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, fifteen reports that summarize how he
+slept and ate and — I want to be clear that I did think about this — a
+`delete-entry` method that is careful to be idempotent, because deleting the same
+diaper twice should not be an error.
+
+I did not set out to put a baby in a swamp. It just followed, the way these
+things do, from already having put everything else in one.
+
+## What "in a swamp" means
+
+[swamp](https://github.com/swamp-club/swamp) models real resources as typed
+objects with methods — read them, mutate them — and records every run as
+versioned data other models can reference. You write extensions in TypeScript. I
+used it [last week to automate my home certificate
+authority]({{< ref "the-wifi-cert-that-didnt-exist-an-hour-ago" >}}), and the
+whole time I kept thinking about the thing I actually spend all night touching,
+which is not a certificate.
+
+We run [Baby Buddy](https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy) at home — a small,
+self-hosted app for tracking a newborn's feedings, diapers, sleep, pumping,
+temperature, meds. It has a clean REST API. And a REST API, to a certain kind of
+tired brain at 2 a.m., is an invitation.
+
+So I wrote `@kneel/babybuddy`: one model that reads the whole instance into a
+snapshot and writes new entries back, plus a pile of reports that run over that
+snapshot. Log a feeding, delete a mis-logged one, patch a bad timestamp. Then
+ask it questions.
+
+## The reports tell on everyone
+
+The nice thing about summarizing a week of a baby is that the numbers are, on
+their own, quietly insane. Ninety-nine feedings. Sixty-five separate sleep
+sessions. Forty-four doses of medication. His longest unbroken stretch of sleep
+was four hours and forty-eight minutes, which I know to the minute because there
+is a report called `sleep-longest-stretch` and I run it the way other people
+check the weather.
+
+But the report I did not expect to matter was the medication one. I built it to
+answer "are we dosing the vitamin D on schedule," and instead it answered a
+question I had not asked, which is "how many different ways has Neil spelled
+vitamin D at midnight." The answer is three. `Vitamin D`, `Vitamin D Drops`, and
+`Vitamin D drops` are, as far as the database is concerned, three unrelated
+substances, dosed on three overlapping schedules, by one man who was very tired.
+
+That is the honest value of instrumenting anything. Not the dashboard. The moment
+the dashboard shows you your own sloppiness back.
+
+## This is not the first interface. It is the fifth.
+
+Here is the part that I think is genuinely unhinged, and I say that with
+affection for the person who did it: the swamp extension is the *newest* way I
+have to track this child, not the only one, and not by a wide margin.
+
+There is a **mobile app** — a Capacitor wrapper around Baby Buddy with the sharp
+edges filed off. Biometric lock so a phone left on the couch doesn't show the
+whole night's log. Siri intents, so "log a diaper" is a sentence you say into the
+air with both hands full, which is the only state your hands are ever in. Live
+Activities, so a running feeding timer ticks on the lock screen next to the
+elapsed time you are trying not to look at.
+
+There is a **Pebble watchapp**, because I have a Pebble again and it turns out the
+best interface for logging a feed at 3 a.m. is a physical button on your wrist
+that does not emit a single photon more than necessary. Start a timer, stop it,
+pick the amount, done — without the wake-up-your-whole-nervous-system brightness
+of a phone. There is a Pebble smart *ring* on order for the same reason. I am not
+going to defend the ring. The ring defends itself.
+
+There is 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 is **Home Assistant**, which is the layer that nags. At 10:30 it
+reminds whoever is still vertical to prep the overnight bottle. At 11 it reminds
+us the vitamin D goes *in* that bottle — the vitamin D of at least three names.
+If nobody acknowledges it, it asks again. It is, functionally, a very polite
+robot co-parent with a clipboard.
+
+Five interfaces. One baby. Every single one of them a different door into the
+same little REST API.
+
+## Why any of this
+
+You could read all of that as a man building toys instead of sleeping, and you
+would not be entirely wrong. But there is a real thing underneath it, and it is
+the least technical thing in this whole post.
+
+A newborn is a 24-hour operation run by two people who are each getting about
+five hours of sleep in shifts. The single hardest part is not any one feeding.
+It's the *handoff* — the 1 a.m. moment where one of us goes horizontal and the
+other picks up the watch, and the only way that works is if we are both looking
+at the same set of facts. When did he last eat. How much. Is he due. Did the
+vitamin D happen or did I dream that.
+
+All of this tracking — the app, the watch, the voice, the nags, and now the
+swamp — is not quantified-self vanity. It is a shared source of truth for two
+exhausted adults trying to hold one continuous story between them across a
+shift change, in the dark, without waking each other up to ask. The
+instrumentation is the coordination layer. The baby is just where the data
+happens to come from.
+
+## The bit worth keeping
+
+If there's one engineering lesson that survived contact with a real newborn, it's
+the same one from the certificate post, wearing a smaller hat: **data that claims
+to be complete when it isn't is worse than no data.**
+
+When I built the `sync` method, it capped each query at some number of records. A
+sensible default, until you imagine a parent syncing a long window, quietly
+losing the oldest entries, and getting a report that looks whole. So the snapshot
+carries a `truncated` flag now — an honest "there was more than this" — and the
+summary says so out loud instead of lying with a clean-looking table. A review
+pass caught it before it shipped, which is the entire reason to have a review
+pass.
+
+The same instinct is why `delete-entry` swallows a 404 and calls it done. Two
+parents, two devices, one baby — someone *will* delete the same thing twice. The
+tool's job is to make the second delete boring, not to punish you for the racing
+condition of being a family.
+
+He's asleep right now. Twenty-two minutes in, per the timer on my wrist, which I
+will not be checking again, because that would wake the report, which would wake
+me. The extension is [open source on the swamp
+registry](https://github.com/NeilHanlon/swamp-babybuddy) if you also run Baby
+Buddy and also cannot leave a working REST API alone.
+
+---
+
+I do infrastructure and automation for a living through [my consulting
+practice](https://shrugpw.com) — the kind of instrumentation that is nominally
+for adults. The methodology, it turns out, is identical. There is just less
+spit-up.