Divorce is Tough
It’s no joke that divorce is difficult. It’s not some blip on a Grafana board that occurs like an outage; instead its a sustained period of great difficulty. It’s important for those going through it to have healthy surroundings, through either work or home, to stay grounded and positive. In actuality if you’re getting divorced, it’s usually because the relationship became toxic or abusive and the ending of the relationship should bring peace to a tumultuous life experience. On top of the relationship ending and the high-conflict normality that becomes your life, you are usually left with a hefty legal bill as well.
With all the stresses of life piling up, I was looking for a way to stay grounded. It resulted in significant personal growth and a redefinition of who I am as a person.
Staying Grounded
Coding, and just to be frank, building things, was my outlet. I took up new hobbies, but more importantly, I started writing tooling to solve some of my legal woes. I was tired everyday from the stress. There were periods where I couldn’t wake up, and not because I was depressed, but because the mental weight of what I was experiencing was seriously too much. I kept my head straight the whole time, and I knew I needed to know what to prioritize, and I lost the sense of what was most important. I never lost an ounce of the positivity within my character, as David Goggins would say, you “Can’t hurt me.” This became my motto, and with a little extra help from Jocko Willink, I kicked myself in the ass and went right back to my training.
I started coding. I wrote tool after tool to save me time, to stay organized and to mine my own legal data. Almost 3 years after everything started, I have ways to automate and audit reports and claims to dispute falsities in declarations and arguments alike. It started with this.
Decoding Talking Parents
Talking Parents is a platform that stores read-only and timestamped messages to ensure there is no modification to the communications between two parties. Per my court order, my ex and I are required to check and respond to Talking Parents messages every 24 hours. In the event this does not occur, legal action may result in punitive actions up to and including being found in contempt.
This generated exactly the output that I needed. It compared the last time one party sent a message to the time the other party viewed the message.
Leveling Up
Even though it worked, it felt gross. Downloading an html file of the rendered output is less than optimal. So in the spirit of healthy distractions with a goal in mind to fully automate it, I decided to write an Go API client with a cookie jar and all. Since TalkingParents does not appear to support any authentication methods other than form-based authentication via their login page, we had to emulate the login experience by replicating the state. Then, we were able to pass cookies along and access the API to grab our data for further processing and aggregation. Checkout the full Go package on GitHub.
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