# surrogate (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 3 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover surrogate. Page: Feed: --- ## [Some Things Get Worse with Practice:  Round 2 for Our Sperm Deposits](https://gaydadreporter.com/original-articles/second-sperm-deposit) _2026-06-29 · Bryan McColgan, MD · Original Articles - Gay Dad Reporter_ My advice to all future gay intended dads through surrogacy: Do not put yourself through more in-clinic sperm deposits than you have to. It’s miserable. Save yourself the time, travel, and anxiety and keep the frozen sperm until you are holding all your children and enjoying your completed family. ## [Social Media is Not Safe for Gay Dads](https://gaydadreporter.com/original-articles/gay-dad-village) _2026-06-05 · Bryan McColgan, MD · Original Articles - Gay Dad Reporter_ They say it takes a village to raise a child. What if we had our own Gay Dad Village? A place that is safe for all who want to become or are gay dads, to share advice and stories, and to support each other. ## [Hash Surrogate Key Benchmark](https://anderspoirel.net/snippets/hash-surrogate-key-benchmark/) _2026-05-17 · Anders Poirel_ This benchmark compares the join in Snowflake performance of surrogate keys generated via md5 versus surrogate keys generated via md5\_number\_lower64. Run this in a schema you have write permissions on and on a dedicated warehouse to avoid interference with the results. create or replace transient table benchmark\_dim as select row\_number() over (order by null) as natural\_key ,… ## [Our Second Time Picking an Egg Donor](https://gaydadreporter.com/original-articles/picking-egg-donor-second-time) _2026-05-17 · Bryan McColgan, MD · Original Articles - Gay Dad Reporter_ It’s been over a month since I have written about our surrogacy journey. I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to write after our failed third transfer and adjusting to the reality of having to start over. My husband and I needed some time. So where are we now? After 3 years, we are back at selecting an egg donor. Read more about how we approached this process the second time and how it was different… ## [Are MD5 hashes a good default for surrogate keys?](https://anderspoirel.net/posts/are-md5-hashes-a-good-default-for-surrogate-keys/) _2026-05-17 · Anders Poirel_ In the extra-load-transform (ELT) paradigm of data engineering, a popular method to generate surrogate keys in the transformation step is to compute a MD5 hash of uniquely identifying columns and store it as a string. This is the approach of dbt’s built-in generate\_surrogate\_key macro. The arguments for using a hash instead of an incrementing integer sequence are well worn. Hash keys are… ## [Restarting Our Entire IVF and Surrogacy Journey](https://gaydadreporter.com/original-articles/restarting-surrogacy-journey) _2026-03-30 · Bryan McColgan, MD · Original Articles - Gay Dad Reporter_ Setbacks are part of every surrogacy journey, but I didn’t think we would experience a setback of this magnitude. We are out of embryos, so we have to go back to the very beginning and redo our entire journey. Read more to see how we are approaching this complete reset, and what we will do differently this time around. ## [Men Should Discuss Potential Sperm Damage Before Starting Certain Medications](https://gaydadreporter.com/original-articles/medications-male-fertility) _2026-03-25 · Bryan McColgan, MD · Original Articles - Gay Dad Reporter_ There is more focus on male fertility now than ever before. While it is known that certain classes of drugs like those used in chemotherapy are especially toxic for sperm and fertility, there is less known about the impact of more common medications. A recent real world study analyzed databases from the United States and Europe and identified medications potentially causing male infertility or… ## [Gay Dads Have the Same Child Attachment as Lesbian and Straight Parents](https://gaydadreporter.com/original-articles/gay-parent-infant-attachment) _2026-03-01 · Bryan McColgan, MD · Original Articles - Gay Dad Reporter_ ‘Attachment’ refers to the relationship between an infant and a parent where an infant displays a tendency to seek comfort and protection from their parents when they feel scared, anxious, or vulnerable. This attachment has been shown to be critical to a child’s future social development and mental well-being. Essentially, the relationship infants have with their parents is foundational to all… ## [Diary of a Second Embryo Transfer](https://gaydadreporter.com/original-articles/second-embryo-transfer) _2026-02-21 · Bryan McColgan, MD · Original Articles - Gay Dad Reporter_ A brief description of the days before, during, and after our second embryo transfer as international gay intended dads. ## [Gilmore Girls Hates Surrogacy](https://gaydadreporter.com/original-articles/gilmore-girls-surrogacy) _2026-01-26 · Bryan McColgan, MD · Original Articles - Gay Dad Reporter_ I have never been a fan of Gilmore Girls, and I can confidently say I never will be. Why? Because Gilmore Girls hates surrogacy. ## [Open-source Screen Sharing with Control (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/mdcG9RXbWttF) _2026-01-26 · **Sponsored**_ WebRTC screen sharing with simultaneous mouse & keyboard control; viewers join in browser. ## [Spot check random samples of your data](https://anderspoirel.net/posts/spot-check-random-samples-of-your-data/) _2026-01-16 · Anders Poirel_ It’s hard to get around the need to manually inspect real inputs and outputs when working on a data pipeline. Unit tests with well-formed synthetic rows won’t save you if the actual source data look like this: | ticket\_id | category | source | ... |-----------+-------------+----------+---- | 32 | bug | customer | ... | 1 | BUG | customer | | 47 | feature | internal | | 16 | feat. ## [Surrogates’ Mental Health and Contact with Families 20 Years After Their Journeys](https://gaydadreporter.com/original-articles/surrogates-20-years) _2026-01-09 · Bryan McColgan, MD · Original Articles - Gay Dad Reporter_ As a physician, I believe that research is the best way to keep the discussion around surrogacy objective, leading to policies and regulation that are based on science and not opinion. Last November, the first study of its kind was published that followed surrogates 20 years after their journey to evaluate their psychological health and contact with the families they helped. At Gay Dad Reporter, I… ## [An Oklahoma Surrogacy Journey that Led to a Surrogacy Transparency Venture: An Interview with Kevin Timms](https://gaydadreporter.com/original-articles/kevin-timms-figly-health) _2026-01-06 · Bryan McColgan, MD · Original Articles - Gay Dad Reporter_ Kevin Timms is a new gay dad who talked with me about his path to fatherhood, the surprises of surrogacy, and his dedication to surrogacy transparency for other intended parents (IPs). ## [Designing with dataclasses](https://anderspoirel.net/posts/designing-with-dataclasses/) _2025-04-21 · Anders Poirel_ Python dictionaries are available without an import and extremely flexible, which means many Python programmers default to representing data as a dict. Here’s why and when you should use dataclasses instead. Note: I’m using dataclass here since it’s in the standard library. If you’re already using a similar 3rd-party library like the excellent attrs the advice here still… ## [Getting column names from Python DBAPI query results](https://anderspoirel.net/posts/getting-column-names-dbapi-query-results/) _2025-01-05 · Anders Poirel_ PEP-249 (“Python Database API Specification” a.k.a. “DBAPI”) defines a standard interface for database access in Python, implemented by libraries such as psycopg and PyMySQL. One common task with DBAPI libraries that is not immediately obvious is identifying column names in query results, since fetching from a Cursor returns a sequence of list-like rows. For instance, in…