DaughterDrivenDev

Why Parents in Tech Are Special.

2026-03-26T00:00:00Z

Why Parents in Tech Are Special.

Have you ever tried debugging a piece of code while a toddler is using your leg as a climbing wall and someone is yelling “I’m hungryyyy” like it’s a system alert? If yes, congratulations. We’re not just parents. We’re parents in tech, which hits completely different.

There’s something special about people like us who live in both worlds: one full of bugs, builds, and deadlines, and the other full of snacks, bedtime negotiations, and mysterious sticky substances. We don't talk about it enough, but parents in the industry carry a completely unique set of battle-hardened skills that make them exceptional at what they do.

But why?

We know mistakes are part of life.

Nobody ships perfect code. Nobody raises a perfect kid. Parents stopped being precious about errors a long time ago. We've served the wrong meal, forgotten the wrong thing, said the wrong word — and then learned, adjusted, and moved forward. Mistakes aren't failures. They're just undocumented features. That mindset makes us better engineers, better collaborators, and much better at not spiralling when something breaks in production.

We know we will fail. But we also know to try again. We are less frustrated with our failures and know they simply are part of life.

We live in fail-fast cycles — daily.

One minute your toddler is screaming because you cut their sandwich into squares instead of triangles. The next, you're their favourite person on Earth because you found their missing sock behind the radiator. Sound familiar? That's just debugging in a onesie. We swing from "I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing" to "I am an unstoppable genius" in under three minutes — before 7am, coffee-free. In tech, that mental agility isn't just useful. It's essential.

Every day, every moment is just different and we've accepted it. We know how to wing it.

We risk-assess everything — instinctively.

Is this toy a choking hazard? Is this third-party library actively maintained? Is this shortcut going to cause problems in three months? Same brain, different context. Parents are natural testers. We observe, we hypothesise, we try things carefully, and we roll back when needed. We just do it with snacks nearby.

Often parents from other circles find our decisions or argumentations odd (e.g. social media, data privacy, phone usage), think we make a fuss out of nothing. No, we just thought things through and for us, this is the right path.

We think outside the box... because the box is now a rocket ship.

Creative panic is just part of being a parent. When the obvious solution doesn't work, you improvise. You invent. You turn a cardboard box into a spaceship and a problem into an opportunity. That same muscle shows up when you're architecting a solution nobody's thought of yet, or finding a workaround that saves the entire sprint.

Forgot about that costume for tomorrow and it's 9pm already? You wing it.

We manage time like it's critically endangered.

Nap windows. School runs. Sprint deadlines. Quarterly reviews. Parents optimise ruthlessly because every minute is accounted for. We don't waste meetings. We don't let tasks drift. Time is precious, and we've been trained by the most demanding product managers alive... our kids.

We simply do not have time browsing social media during working hours. We have this limited time window and we need to get sh*t done.

We handle pressure without flinching.

We've been screamed at by tiny, irrational humans who have no concept of logic, context, or appropriate volume levels. A tense stakeholder meeting? A difficult client call? Honestly, light work.

Do you also get calmer the more chaos around you erupts?

We can hold an enormous amount of pain.

Sleep deprivation. Emotional exhaustion. Being needed by absolutely everyone, all at once, with nothing left in the tank. Parents have shipped features through all of that. We don't just cope with hard — we've built a house there.

Senior engineer? Sure. But parent-engineer? That's a different league entirely.

Do you agree? We'd love to hear from you.

Marcin && Ola

Winter is here.

2026-01-12T00:00:00Z

Winter is here.

Snow is piling up across Europe and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Slippery roads, canceled flights, stuck trains. The perfect movie-like version of parenthood? Building two-meter-high snowmen with our kids, screaming as they ride down hills on sleds while scarves flap in the wind, snowball fights everywhere.

Reality, however, looks a bit different. The thing we are most afraid of is the board at the kindergarten entrance. During this season, kids do not collect and trade Pokémon cards. They collect and trade illnesses.

A short summary from the board in our youngest child’s group during the last two weeks before Christmas: stomach flu (several cases), hand-foot-mouth disease (several cases), scarlet fever (once, yaaay), COVID (a looooot).

The panic sets in and questions start popping up in our heads: How do you, without sounding like a terrible person and scaring them for life, tell your kid that maybe they shouldn’t hug and wrestle Paul, whose entire shirt and face are covered in neon-green snot?

The domino effect.

Of course, it never stops at just one kid. The stomach flu comes home on Monday. By Wednesday, the sibling has it. By Friday, one parent is down. By Sunday, the other one follows. And then, in some cruel joke of nature, the original patient — the one who started it all — is fully recovered and bouncing off the walls at six in the morning, demanding pancakes, while two adults lie on the couch questioning every life choice that led them here. The whole household falls like dominoes, stretched across two or three weeks, and you never quite remember what it feels like to have everyone healthy at the same time.

The false hope.

And just when you think it is over — the nose is dry, the fever is gone, the energy is back — you send them to kindergarten again. You sit down at your desk. You open your laptop. You take a deep breath. Freedom. Then your phone rings at 10am. "Could you please come pick up your child?" Back to square one. The cruelest part is that brief window of hope. You had already mentally rescheduled your week. You had told your team you would be back. You had believed it was over.

The guilt.

How do you deal with the fallout when the kids get sick? And we know it is not IF, it is WHEN. How do you burn down carefully planned schedules and time-boxed calendars your team agreed on weeks ago? How do you tell your team that a deadline that once seemed very achievable might now be a stretch, because your other team, this small human needs us right now.

And it is not just the logistics. It is the guilt — and it comes from both sides. When you call in sick for your kid, you feel it toward your team. The standup you are missing. The pull request no one will review. The sprint goal slipping. But when you do sneak in a quick Slack message while your kid is watching Bluey with a fever on the couch, the guilt flips. You are right here, but you are not really here. Your kid asks you something, and you say "one second" for the third time, and you see it in their face. You cannot win. You are always letting someone down, and somehow it is always yourself too.

You are not alone.

Starting in November, we hear dozens of stories like this from parents. Some are even painfully funny. Others create an instant sense of solidarity. Sometimes you even hear a genuinely helpful idea about how to cope with all of this. All of them weirdly make us feel better, as we know we are not alone in this.

So what is your story? How do you cope? We'd love to hear from you.

Marcin && Ola

Hello fellow parent in tech,

2025-12-19T00:00:00Z

Hello fellow parent in tech,

Thank you, you decided to become a part of our journey. In our first newsletter, we’d like to introduce ourselves quickly and explain how this project started.

So, how did we get here?

Marcin and I met in Dortmund somewhere around 2013. Both migrated as kids from Poland (names might have given that away, haven’t they) to small cities on the Westside of Germany. Both engineers already. We saw each other at meetups/conferences from time to time, but as a solo parent, my world was already so different from his. Our lines barely crossed. I moved to Berlin. Worked on open source projects and Firefox full-time. Spoke at and organized conferences. Enjoyed my life with the little one and lived a full daughter-driven-dev life.

Fast-forward to today…

I got a message from Marcin on LinkedIn, who now is a dad of 3 amazing kids. Totally random. He asked me if I wrote a book about how to survive as an engineer and a parent, as I lived that for such a long time already. Or, at least, if I could write one. As I said… That felt SO random. To be honest, I am an idiot most of the time. Of course, I misunderstood. I thought he asked me to write something like that TOGETHER. I actually liked that idea. He didn’t. Until he did…

Since then, we had so much fun talking about our lives, our ups and downs as parents and basically how to survive this wild ride. We know all of you experienced what we are talking about.

This is where YOU come in!

This is why we have set up this newsletter. It is not a one way street. We want to hear from you as well. We want you, your life, your experience to be a part of this project, because it gave us so much already to do this together.

If you find a minute in your busy life, maybe while hanging out on the playground or during your commute from kindergarten to work, it would be brilliant if you could share a bit about yourself. Maybe how many kids you have or what the biggest struggle is you are dealing with right now?

We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Marcin && Ola