Alright, where do we start? I’m Adam Stack as you may have gathered from the URL that got you here. Life is a little hectic and I feel like I work on some interesting self-directed projects so I thought I’d put something out into the ether. So here it is, adamstack.me.
Personally/socially most of my time is spent with my family. My wonderful wife Kat and our amazing son Westley. I also see my parents 2-3 times a week, and sometimes more in the holiday months. They love to spend time with Westley, and he loves to spend time with them. Kat’s family lives in Minnesota and we try to go up or have them come down a few times a year. Never enough.
Professionally, After almost 20 years in IT the powers that be felt that I, and almost the entire department I worked in were deemed…inessential. Though this was very stressful, the months leading up to it were even more so. Everyone knew something was coming, rumors were flying and a noxious stench that infiltrated every aspect of mine and my coworkers lives. A bit later I would read the book Character Limit about the takeover and eventual mutation of Twitter into X and realize this was not specific to the company that I was forced to leave.
This did however put my family in a position that we likely wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves, but after some conversation it became clear. At least in the short term, I would be a stay at home dad with time to work on a few ideas that had been percolating.
The first idea I had was otto, it’s a home automation platform built on top of Home Assistant. Home Assistant is a techies dream platform: open source with a rich contributor base. This also meant that there was lots of data that AI would have available to it. This was my first introduction to working with LLMs every day. Very early on I tried and liked Claude. So much so I signed up for Claude Max almost immediately.
The otto product was designed it to be completely modular; allowing for up to 9 users and 10 rooms. It would enable room presence detection and adjust smart devices in the home to meet my requirements. I spent a bit over 6 months really trying to nail it down, but things were getting slower and often felt buggier. When another idea came to mind it was timed just perfectly with another tools introduction.
Another idea that I had floating around for about 2 years was a visual schedule of sorts. My son is autistic and benefits from regular reminders of what a day’s plan is. His preschool teacher had recommended a tool from amazon that gave you a laminated long cardboard strip with velcro pieces on it and then a whole collection of activity tiles. You could then velcro the first activity to the top and the next one below it and so on. It was interesting, because just the way that the activities lined up very much reminded me of Google’s “Material Design” tiles, and that it would be fairly straight forward to design an app around that, but I was not a developer, so filed under “interesting but inactionable”.
I had learned quite a bit from developing otto though. I found that I could just describe what I wanted to happen in technical terms to Claude and he would write the code to enable the functionality. VERY quickly the code that was being generated by my prompts was more than it would be worth to read it. I quickly found that prompt, build, test, troubleshoot was the cycle. This is what gave me the confidence to try something completely different and Claude Code was now available to make it possible.
This is where StackMap (stackmap.app) came from. I tripped a few times trying to get everything working just so. There was a lot of technical things to getting this working including buying a domain, subscribing to hosting, and then developing and deploying the code. I’m sure I’ll go over that in a future post, as I’m just trying to set the stage here a little bit with this post. But I did end up getting a web app as well as mobile apps distributed. More importantly I’m using it every day with my son. I also made two other apps, SmilePile and Manylla. SmilePile is a simplified photo gallery app that lets a parent curate an experience for the child in which they can navigate different sets of photos with a simplified swipe based mechanism. Manylla is a special needs information tracker for parents that need to be sure they have everything for IEP meetings, pediatrician appointments, even daycare. These apps are not as mature as StackMap.
I also do some work in the autism community. For about 2 years I’ve organized an Autism Dads group that meets monthly at a local restaurant to talk with people that get it. I’m also on the board of the local Autism Society and working with a small group to run “Up with Families”, a weekend retreat for recently diagnosed special needs families. We have a day program for parents and the kids are treated to a super fun day with volunteers and entertainment.
So anyway, I think it’s fair to call that an introduction. I don’t know exactly what this is gonna be yet, but maybe come back and see if I posted something later. I’m also building this blog as I’m writing it, so things may change, but hopefully the content will stay the same. As my family says:
OK, we’ll talk to you later!