A laptop on the playground
An ordinary solo-dev weekend with the family: pet shops and ice cream with the kids, an airport run at five in the morning — and agents writing code while I push the swings.
By Georg Malahov
Let me show you what my productive weekend looks like. Not a model one — an ordinary one.
Saturday, May 2, started with a mission: my older daughter dreams of guinea pigs, so we went on a tour of pet shops. Three of them. In person, the guinea pigs didn't impress the kids, but everyone fell for the Mongolian gerbils — cute little mice that live two or three years and need a big cage. We found out everything we needed; now we can start buying what it takes. On the way we stopped at our ice cream café — the ice cream looks like any other ice cream, the flavors are named like everywhere else, and yet it's unbelievably better than anywhere else: can that even happen? Then one playground, another playground, dinner. My older daughter spent the whole evening riding the momentum, watching videos on how to care for the mice and working out where the cage should go.
By nine in the evening I had driven the kids over to family friends for the night. The sensible thing would have been to go to bed: at five in the morning I had to drive my parents to the airport, they were flying off on holiday. But we had only just gotten free — so of course I sat down with my subtitle editor. Pushed the first version over the line: styles can be picked, subtitles move along the timeline, and even burning them into the video works right in the browser. Slept little, in a word.
At five fifteen my parents arrived, I drove them to Frankfurt, and on the way back bought breakfast rolls at a bakery. We had breakfast at home, my wife started on the Olivier salad, and I got to my projects. The morning went into planning: I wrote the tasks up into plans for agents — Claude sessions that carry out such a plan without me — and set them to work. Then we drove off to pick up the kids.
From three to six — playgrounds again and the same ice cream café. I took the laptop with me and worked right there on the playground: the agents did their tasks all day, and all I had to do was review the results and merge them in one by one. It sounds funny, but that's exactly what the workflow of a solo developer with two kids looks like: the code gets written while I push the swings. In the evening, literally half an hour ago, I generated a new subtitled video with the deployed version of the editor — and everything worked.
I underestimate the size of my projects and never manage to bring them to a perfect state. But on my birthday, which was this week, I wrote down an intention: to learn the courage to publish things unfinished, incomplete, imperfect. This weekend, it seems, was the first exercise. Working on it, growing with it. Now I'll catch up on sleep — and things will be properly good.