Hello, my name is Adam and I’ve decided to write some things into the void. I work on some interesting self-directed projects so I thought I’d document some of it. So, though we’re not quite sure what it is yet, here is adamstack.me.
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 infiltrated every aspect of my coworkers’ lives and mine. But eventually it went from stressful chaos to calm & normalcy.
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. It wasn’t clear whether any of the ideas would be profitable or helpful to others, but what a privilege to be given the time and resources to try something of my own.
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.
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 being generated was more than I could reasonably read through. 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.
Claude Code enabled another idea that I had floating around for about 2 years. It 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 straightforward to design an app around that, but I was not a developer, so filed under “interesting but inactionable”.
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!