David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #37 (March 2026)

Posted 2026-03-15 under #dispatch

February was quick but full. We had a few things hit all at the same time – some good friends visiting from Canada, our company hackathon, and an extended visit from my family. It was hectic but we made it all work, and the month went by in a flash.

Four kids, one couch, absolute chaos. A child clings to their grandmother on a swing at the playground.

New Car

As mentioned last month, our faithful Honda CR-V gave up the ghost in January, and we bought a new (to us) Toyota Rav4 Prime in early February. It’s cool – about 50 miles of electric range before the gas motor kicks in. We don’t presently have a way to charge it at home, but there are chargers near our office and Central Park, and between those, we were able to go an entire month before needing to fill up.

I’ll avoid thinking about what percent of my life is keeping things charged. Claire calls me “the charging fairy,” flitting around the house, plugging things in.

Pointless Palooza

We did our annual company hackathon, and for the first time, I pitched an original idea and lead a team instead of contributing to someone else’s concept. We built a pretty cool thing, a 3D printed keychain that contains a QR code and two AprilTags that make up a sort of public/private key pair. The QR code launches a web app, and then uploading a photo of the two tags lets you claim a profile. Then, scanning your private tag with someone else’s public tag lets you connect with them. We built a Diablo-esque inventory/leveling system where each connection you make grants you an additional level and a piece of gear.

Early CAD render of a compact two-part enclosure, shown exploded to reveal the internal cutouts and mounting features. A work-in-progress character screen for my dungeon crawler, featuring a very good hat and exactly one equipped pair of pants.

This was fun to build, and pretty novel – a web app with no real notion of login state; your identity is solely a physical thing you have in your possession. The team is going to continue iterating on the concept and roll it out to the company at large at our big event in May. More to come on that.

The whole hackathon was pretty nuts in terms of what folks were able to do with AI. In years prior, a team’s success (in terms of ability to ship a working product) was pretty closely correlated with how many developers were on the team. Not so this year – every team was able to ship polished, working software. Claire built this game. I’m glad I was able to make something a little bit different. The ability to come up with original concepts and execute on them will be increasingly important as AI gets more capable of building the sort of CRUD apps that defined my earlier career.

3D printing

Still loving the 3D printer. Valentine’s Day is a big deal at my kids’ school. We printed a bunch of these stegos for Nev’s class, these cars for Nico’s, and some custom stencils made with OpenSCAD. Otherwise just making stuff for the office and kitchen, toys for the kids and their friends (check out this robot and motorcycle), and generally just the little plastic bits and bobs that make life run a little more smoothly (like this buckle to secure the straps on Nev’s bike seat).

This Month

Reading & Listening

References