i became a dad in december 2020 (first time). easily the best thing that ever happened to me… and also the biggest shock to my circadian rhythm. like any data nerd faced with chaos, i did the only logical thing hahah i started tracking it.
using BabyTracker, i logged everything: sleep, feeding, diapers, mood, wake windows. by the time my daughter turned eight months old, i had enough data to build a full dashboard of what new parent life actually looks like.
the first version was in tableau. i tracked sleep patterns, feeding frequency, diaper counts (yes, i went there). later i rebuilt it with vue + d3.js, mostly out of curiosity and to see how far ai-assisted coding tools could go. i used Cursor to handle scaffolding and debugging, which made it weirdly easy to pull together a responsive dataviz without touching much code.
what’s fascinating is how clearly the patterns emerge. you can literally see sleep stabilizing around month 4, feeding sessions dropping off as solids come in, and “parent free time” staying perfectly flat at 0 hours per day. adding data from our second baby later made it even more fun — it’s basically a family analytics dashboard now.
what strikes me most is how easy it’s become to build something like this. a few evenings, some curiosity, and suddenly you’re staring at the full rhythm of early parenthood. visualized!
no deep moral here, just a reminder that even total chaos becomes beautiful when you plot it. kids will wreck your sleep, but they’ll give you some damn good datasets in return.
by nickvaliotti
3 Comments
Hi! My kid will probably be born in the next week. Can I ask what sounds like a snarky question, but is actually a fearful one? “Parent free time staying perfectly flat at 0 hours per day.” When did you build this if not in your free time?
A beeswarm would be better than a jittered strip plot for bottom right
“you can literally see sleep stabilizing around month 4, feeding sessions dropping off as solids come in, and “parent free time” staying perfectly flat at 0 hours per day” – where exactly? You posted a cropped picture and no link to anything else. Literally only a cropped picture that shows none of that in it.