David Eisinger

Dispatch #35 (January 2026) (2026-01-08)

Happy new year! Big month. My girl turned four, which is somehow both shockingly old and young. Sometimes I look at her and think, I can’t believe you’re not still two. Other times she says things and I think, I can’t believe you’re not, like, twelve. We threw her a party at Hyper Kidz, then my folks took her to Asheville for a few days.

Dispatch #34 (December 2025) (2025-12-10)

We took a quick trip down to Lake Norman to visit Claire’s grandmother, but the big travel in November was up to New York for Thanksgiving. We did a long weekend in NYC then spent a week at my sister’s house. The kids loved the big city (especially the Statue of Liberty cruise, Bluey’s House, and this giant indoor playground). I just loved soaking up the city – we were there a few months ago, but that was mostly in Brooklyn, which is a pretty distinct thing from being in Lower Manhattan. We’ll be back.

Dispatch #33 (November 2025) (2025-11-05)

I fear the days of Big Baby Nico are coming to a close. My man’s walking, talking, making his desires known. It was a good run, 17 months almost. It felt like Nev sort of skipped this phase, so this was a novel experience, and Tiny Toddler Nico is awesome. The best is when we’re putting on a fresh diaper and he looks down, waves, and says, “bye bye my penis.”

Dispatch #32 (October 2025) (2025-10-04)

Claire took the kids away for a weekend with her sister and some childhood friends, all of whom have boys roughly Nico’s age. I find myself home alone for the first time in … I don’t know how long, before Nev was born almost four years ago. Strange feeling – so quiet. Not bad, just so different from my normal life. I can’t believe I used to live like this.

Dispatch #31 (September 2025) (2025-09-08)

Big month! Nico took his first steps. Nev’s onto a new school (well same school, but moved from the 0-3 building to the 3-5). She seems to be taking to it pretty well, but keeps asking if she can go back to being a little girl, which is adorable and absolutely heartbreaking.

Local Docker Best Practices (viget.com, 2022-05-05)

Here at Viget, Docker has become an indispensable tool for local development. We build and maintain a ton of apps across the team, running different stacks and versions, and being able to package up a working dev environment makes it much, much easier to switch between apps and ramp up new devs onto projects. That’s not to say that developing with Docker locally isn’t without its drawbacks¹, but they’re massively outweighed by the ease and convenience it unlocks.

“Friends” (Undirected Graph Connections) in Rails (viget.com, 2021-06-09)

No, sorry, not THOSE friends. But if you’re interested in how to do some graph stuff in a relational database, SMASH that play button and read on.

Making an Email-Powered E-Paper Picture Frame (viget.com, 2021-05-12)

Over the winter, inspired by this digital photo frame that uses email to add new photos, I built and programmed a trio of e-paper picture frames for my family, and I thought it’d be cool to walk through the process in case someone out there wants to try something similar.

Why I Still Like Ruby (and a Few Things I Don’t Like) (viget.com, 2020-08-06)

The Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey came out a couple months back, and while I don’t put a ton of stock in surveys like this, I was surprised to see Ruby seem to fare so poorly – most notably its rank on the “most dreaded” list. Again, who cares right, but it did make me take a step back and try to take an honest assessment of Ruby’s pros and cons, as someone who’s been using Ruby professionally for 13 years but loves playing around with other languages and paradigms. First off, some things I really like.

Hacker News Book Map (via) (2026-01-09)

This is a map of the 1000 most mentioned books on Hacker News.

OpenSCAD Is Kinda Neat – nuxx.net (via) (2026-01-07)

OpenSCAD is a rather different type of CAD tool, one in which you write code to generate objects

My 2026 Q1 Planning and Moving to a New Planner – Writing at Large (2026-01-05)

That’s it. There are no stickers in my planner, no highlighters, illustrations and such. It’s a practical tool for me. I won’t photograph it for the blog or social media because it’s so personal, and that’s its job – to work for me, not to generate content or likes. It isn’t pretty, but boy is it functional. I reference it at least one or two time a day every day. From it stems my daily to-do list, my weekly review, my long and short term plans. It’s an investment that’s paid dividends over the years, and from what I can tell my new format promises to pay me back even more.

Home is where my stuff is | Ruslan Osipov (via) (2025-12-30)

This is why decluttering is so hard. It’s not really about tidiness. It’s about deciding which past selves get to stay.

Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life (via) (2025-12-30)

The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.

A blog is a biography | Dries Buytaert (via) (2025-12-28)

If that idea feels compelling, this might be a good time to start a blog or a website. Not to build a large audience, but just to leave a trail. Future you may be grateful you began.

The Best Things and Stuff of 2025 (2025-12-24)

Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2025. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.

This life gives you nothing - Blackbird Spyplane (via) (2025-12-20)

When we do this, we don’t just find ourselves with more time on our hands, but with more life on our hands, too. Because we set things back in motion. The world remains the same, but the way we see it changes.

Five Months of Journalling • Robb Knight (via) (2025-12-01)

I am going to continue with this, tweaking things as needed. As long as I'm keeping up with the things I want to get done, whatever that ends up looking like in my journal, I'm happy.

xkcd: Fifteen Years (via) (2025-11-28)

“Want to feel old?” “Yes.”