Why I built Feed

I wrote most of this in the hospital, during our son's first week. I'm posting it three weeks later, from home. I've left the original as I wrote it — in the present tense, in the thick of it — because that's the headspace the app was built for. There's an update at the end.

I became a father a week ago.

We're still in the hospital. Our son lost 11% of his birth weight by day three, which is past the threshold where the team starts watching closely, and we haven't been discharged yet. Every feed matters. Every gram on the scale matters. The plan is breast → top-up → pump, on a schedule, around the clock, and the goal is to see the curve turn.

It is the most stressful thing I have ever lived through.

There are nurses around 24/7. They are kind and they know what they're doing. And still — sitting next to my wife, watching her recover from delivery while also trying to feed a baby who isn't gaining, I have felt as helpless as I've ever felt about anything. I can't make milk. I can't fix the latch. I can't speed up the weight check. Most of what's happening is happening in someone else's body, on someone else's clock.

So I did the thing I know how to do. I opened my laptop and built an app.

What it actually solves

The hospital gives you paper trackers. They work, but they're paper: you can't see a pattern across days, you can't tell at a glance whether last night was better than the night before, and you certainly can't be reminded by a piece of paper at 3 AM when both of you have finally fallen asleep.

What I wanted was small and specific:

• One place to log a session. Diaper, both sides of breast time, formula top-up, pumped volume, a free-text note. The same flow every time.
• A reminder that actually wakes me up. Not a notification I might miss — a real alarm, ringing through Do Not Disturb, scheduled the moment a feed ends.
• A picture of the trend. A 24-hour timeline strip per day, daily totals, a pumping chart with a rolling average. Something I can show a nurse or a pediatrician without scrolling through a notebook.

That's it. That's the app. It's called Feed, it's local-only, it lives on the phone, and it's built around the assumption that you're exhausted and you need the next action to be obvious.

The part I didn't expect

In the maternity ward you meet other parents. You meet them in the milk room at 2 AM. You meet them at the lactation consultant's door. You meet them in the hallway when you're both pacing with a swaddled newborn who won't settle.

Several of them are in some version of our situation. Significant weight loss, a tight feeding plan, the same exhausted look. And every one of them, when I described what I was building, said something like "can you send that to me when it's done?"

That's why this exists as a thing other people can install, instead of a private hack on my phone. If it helps even one of those parents make it through one fewer 3 AM panic — calculating in their head whether the baby has had enough, whether they should pump now or sleep, whether the trend is going the right direction — then the hours I spent on it during my paternity-leave-that-isn't-really-leave were worth it.

What I hope you get out of it

I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm not collecting data. There's no account. The app is on GitHub, free, and the build comes out of a public CI pipeline so you can see exactly what's in it.

What I hope is this:

• A small amount of control in a situation that mostly removes it. Logging a feed is a thing you can do, even when most of the work is the baby's and your partner's.
• Evidence over feeling. When you're sleep-deprived, every night feels worse than the last. The chart often disagrees. Trust the chart.
• A useful artifact for the nurses and the pediatrician. Hand them the phone. The timeline strip explains a week in about three seconds.

To my wife

You are doing the hard part. The actual hard part. I see it. The app is the easiest thing in this whole experience and we both know it. But if logging on it gives you one less thing to hold in your head between feeds, then it's done its job.

To the other parents on this ward, and the ones on the next one

I'm sorry you're here. It's going to be okay. The curve turns. Ours is starting to.

If the app helps, take it. If it doesn't, ignore it — no offense taken. Either way, you're not alone in this hallway.

— A new dad, week one

Three weeks later

We're home now.

The curve turned. The weight came back, the feeds settled into something that almost resembles a rhythm, and the 3 AM panics — while not gone — are fewer. The hospital is behind us. I'm reading this back from the couch instead of a fold-out chair next to a hospital bed, and the difference is everything.

The app outlived the crisis that created it. I still open it every session, and I still check the timeline tab when a night feels like it's going sideways — and the chart still, reliably, disagrees with the feeling.

If you're reading this from the hallway I was in three weeks ago: it does get better. Ours did. I hope yours does too.

— A new dad, three weeks in