BabyDuty or: How PagerDuty Accidentally Prepared me for Fatherhood

Becoming a new parent unexpectedly parallels the experience of being an on-call engineer, as highlighted by the author's journey of fatherhood, where tools and skills from his professional life at PagerDuty proved surprisingly applicable. By adopting technical strategies like setting up PagerDuty alerts for newborn care tasks, utilizing incident commander tactics to maintain calm during childbirth, and applying scribing techniques to track his baby's feeding and diaper changes, the author seamlessly integrates engineering methodologies into parenting. Despite the humorous and tongue-in-cheek narrative, the discussion delves into serious insights, such as the importance of staying calm under pressure, creating structured routines, and the challenges of functioning without the option of escalation, akin to incident response scenarios. The piece concludes by acknowledging the shared experiences and camaraderie among parents, drawing a parallel to the solidarity found in the engineering community, and underscoring the universality of the lessons learned from both roles.