Welcome to Newsletter #9!

Here’s what we have in store today:

1. End-of-season survey

2. Review of NPCC’s first season

3. What’s happening this summer

4. May 31 meetup recap

5. Member project highlights

6. Odds & ends

1. End-of-season survey

I need your help to make NPCC better next season. Please share your thoughts in this 3-minute survey by 10 PM on Tuesday, June 16, 2026.

Tell me what's working, what to fix, how to fix it, and what you'd like to see more of.

Your opinion still matters even if you haven’t attended a meetup. I will report the survey results back to you as soon as they’re ready.

NPCC Season 1 (Oct 2025 to May 2026) Survey

Please click the link to complete this form.

2. Review of NPCC’s first season

Back in September 2025, when I first posted NPCC flyers at Cambridge playgrounds, vibe coding and making apps still felt like "the thing."

Just a few months later, these two concepts somehow already seemed ancient. Do we still need apps when versatile AI agents can execute any task thrown at them, prompted using plain English from a phone?

Of course, that turned out to be a tad too optimistic a read. Remember when Bert, Julie's OpenClaw bot, thought it was a good idea to use the word 'erotic' in an email to her accountant? I myself am now a devotee of regular external hard drive backup, fearful of Claude wiping out all my work, which did happen twice.

At our last meetup, Nate pointed out that user interfaces had started to feel outdated and unnecessary. For example, to plan a multi-week trip abroad, why bother clicking through buttons when agents loaded with trip-planning skills can talk to MCP servers directly?

Rapid tech evolution aside, here are three ways in which NPCC surprised me. I’d love to know if you agree or disagree or have something to add.

Surprise #1: Enrichment over efficiency

I think many of us, myself included, were initially attracted to NPCC because we thought AI would streamline all our cumbersome family tasks. A disproportionately large number of NPCC parents, for instance, said they were going to build a meal planner. And so I imagined we would spend our meetups exchanging strategies for eliminating our family life’s many hassles.

Well, that did not happen.

Maybe the reason was that designing a great logistical system, even for a user of one, is harder than it looks. Or maybe the pains of family logistics aren’t as bad as they seem. Or maybe the parents who are buried in tasks just can’t escape them long enough to build anything.

Royce’s talk in April offered a clue that rang truer to me than any of the possible reasons above. He used AI to make parenting harder, not easier. In other words, Royce suggested that AI is a tool for raising the bar, not for making work disappear.

This view resonates because when I look across all the projects that have been presented at the meetups, it’s clear that they were fueled primarily by a sense of curiosity, fun, challenge, empowerment, excitement—not exasperation or exhaustion. The projects are about making life richer, as opposed to automating it away.

One exception might be Joseph’s Nova Nudge, a “never-miss-a-camp-signup-deadline-again” tool. (Based on a true story 🤔??)

I guess we often fantasize about having the license to do nothing, but the nerd instinct to push boundaries is too powerful to overcome.

Surprise #2: So far, NPCC is more about transmitting inspiration and ethos than skills.

Back in 2025, I thought there would be a lot of co-working, co-building, and co-tutoring happening among us. However, I tried organizing no fewer than five events around these activities, and in all five, everyone ended up having more fun exchanging experiences and sharing project stories.

This puzzled me at first, but when I watched the first parent project talk by Karan in January, it clicked. Listening to Karan describe his problem-solving and creation process instantly made me itch to build something myself. During that same meetup, multiple parents told me that they saw the meetup as valuable time for chatting and connecting, whereas building and learning skills could be done alone in their own time.

I began to see that what’s most fun about NPCC is getting inspired by each other’s ingenuity and determination to merge creative and family work into one. The dissemination of tools and skills is secondary, at least for now.

In subsequent months, we found further inspiration from the story of how Dave, with no prior dev background, launched FamTiVi, a production-grade app for creating disciplined TV-watching based on YouTube content. We saw Maria and Ozair’s memorable custom DAKboard, which kept them on top of trash days and taught their young kids time management.

We learned about Satabdi’s determination to construct a language learning app while on maternity leave with a hip injury. We also got to see Rob’s intimidating home server setup, evidence that self-belief plus ChatGPT could get you very far.

The message is clear and simple: Whatever you’ve always wanted to do, just do it!

Surprise #3: Kids as collaborators, not just beneficiaries.

At first, I thought NPCC was going to be a sanctuary for parents who want to build things away from their kids. I imagined the meetups would provide time and space in which parents could take a break from being interrupted 20x per hour.

I was wrong, again!

Pretty quickly, the “whole families welcome” concept evolved to be the right fit for NPCC.

At the January meetup, a quick, casual “hi” at the snack table with Grin made me realize how cool it would be for parents to team up with their kids to demo a project.

This led to Grin and Misha showing us how to build Super-Mario-like games in Replit and to Nate and Leif demoing a 3D RPG game built on Godot.

These two meetups were among the most well-attended ones. Several parents in fact told me they brought their kids to the meetup specifically to watch the demos, which made me realize here was another way in which AI could up the family game, no pun intended.

Clearly, I’m not that good at predicting things. I don’t know where things will be a year from now, but I do hope we’ll find out together!

3. What’s happening this summer

As we take a break from the meetups, I plan to work on the projects below. I’d love for you to join me:

Summer project #1: Increasing the impact of parent projects

There are so many VERY COOL projects in our community. Every parent presentation at the meetups has been super awesome, and I've always felt it's a shame these projects reach only a handful of parents when so many others could benefit.

How can we make NPCC parent projects more impactful beyond our immediate community? Could NPCC become a family software co-op? Could we thoughtfully design a platform for parents to share projects in a way that’s truly useful for other parents? Think Teachers Pay Teachers or Etsy but for parent-built family tools.

I know some of us are already thinking along these lines. Please reach out if you’re interested in pursuing these possibilities with me.

Summer project #2: Growing the Nerdy Parents community

I have not posted new NPCC ads since early September 2025. This was a conscious decision to find our footing first before attempting to grow. Any new members so far have come from referrals or old ads that somehow survived the weather.

This summer, however, seems like the right time to expand our community. New members will add variety to our meetup topics, bring in new perspectives, and multiply our creative energy in the new season.

Please reach out if you’d like to help recruit new Nerdy Parents, publicize our community more broadly, or start your own chapter outside Cambridge.

Summer project #3: Enhancing the meetups (more fun, more meaningful, variety)

Many of you, without a doubt, have better event-organizing and entertainment skills than I do. Please reach out if you’d like to help rethink, plan, and run the meetups in some capacity in the new season.

4. May 31 meetup recap

Unlike the previous few meetups, our last meetup was attended almost entirely by adults—there was only one cute baby in attendance—and the majority were meetup first-timers. I was happy to see in person, at last, several NPCC members who signed up a while back. (Thank you guys for coming!) 

At the start of the meetup, we shared what we wished for our kids to learn in the next year. The answers ranged from piano for one four-year-old to vocal drills (think trills) for a six-month-old!

We had three excellent project presentations, summarized in the section below.

5. Member project highlights

Modular apps (Micah Goodman)

In his work running a behavioral health tech company, Micah kept noticing the same features re-created over and over again across platforms. He wants to help avoid this kind of effort duplication in the world of family software.

After all, virtually all families deal with things like meal planning, scheduling, coordination, and budgeting—each of which can be addressed by a specialized app. Micah is developing a common platform to support and integrate such apps.

This technically challenging work is in progress. Let Micah know if you’re up for giving him feedback, both in terms of engineering and usability.

Personal AI operating system (Nate Aune)

While planning a father-son trip to Europe in the past, Nate experienced a frustrating but familiar flow: he had to keep inputting the same information into different tools: Claude, ChatGPT, Google Flights, Amex Travel, and an airline bot. Copy paste names, passport numbers, allergy list. Then copy paste again, and again...

What would everyday life look like if every bit of information about us became AI-accessible? How do we build a system that allows this to happen without creating huge privacy and security risks?

As a consummate knowledge curator, Nate is well-positioned to answer this question. He is right now sitting on 26,000+ perfectly organized notes across Evernote, Roam, and Apple Notes, amassed over 17 years, ideal for building a personal AI operating system.

So Nate got to work, and the personal OS is up and running after nine days of effort. The system is a folder of plain-text Markdown files (Obsidian vaults, organized with the PARA method and version-controlled with git) plus a homemade local search engine that indexes everything so an AI can actually read it. You capture your context exactly once (names, doctors, allergies, travel preferences) in a file every AI tool can read from. External AI agents talk to this system via MCP, and "skills" can plug in to teach the system specific tasks.

Post-build, Nate could type "find me a morning departure to Copenhagen for two," and the system would read his travel profile, run a real flight search through a local CLI, and propose six options along with the tradeoffs. Once he booked, it would even save the confirmation back into his notes, so tomorrow's AI would already know about the trip.

Nate also found that it could model five credit-card points strategies, saving him $1,348 in trip costs from just ten minutes of compute.

This trip-planning use case is a relatively small example of how Nate's personal OS could transform everyday life. It is very much a living project, and Nate is actively looking for beta testers. Imagine what this personal OS could do for your life, and give Nate a shout!

6. Odds & ends

• Remember to fill out the 3-minute end-of-season survey.

• Add your project to the NPCC project wall.

• Follow NPCC on Instagram to see event photos.

• Want other NPCC parents to know who you are? Visit the NPCC member directory and complete your bio interview.

  

Despite the meetups hibernating this summer, I’m in town most weeks and always down to get together with or without a specific agenda. Please don’t hesitate to say hi.

Also, remember that the nerdyparents@groups.io list is there for you to ask questions, share knowledge, and propose ideas.

Thank you, and have a cheerful summer!

Wendy

PS: Your much-appreciated contributions to NPCC have helped cover the costs of software, refreshments, supplies, and other miscellaneous expenses. To make a donation to NPCC, visit NPCC’s Venmo or scan this QR code: