Don't want to get scooped by GoDaddy when they hear the good news.

Consider whether you'd be questioning this if the author had written that within minutes of his daughter being born, her photo was on Facebook. The only thing it suffers from is not being normalized and taking marginally more* effort, while being nowhere nearly as creepy.

* or arguably the same amount or less; for additional context: the author is an ex-Googler

To be faiiiir, when your partner is absolutely zonked out in the minutes post-delivery, what else is there to do when you're by their side and still half-asleep? Time to start announcing your pride and joy to the world, starting with a domain zone file.

I even suspect that the name of the child was dependent on the domain name being free... but then, it shouldn't be too hard to set up the request in advance and just press the button once the child is born. Maybe there was some rule that names could only be registered for living (i.e., born) persons?

Maybe they wanted the Created Date for the domain to match the birth date.

Pretty crazy to be focused on anything other than your immediate family in after a birth... but not exactly unprecedented when you look at social media posts!

I mean, you've already had 10 months to come up with some name ideas. It's not like it's a huge surprise when it happens. You could even register the names before they're born.

  whois firstlast.com | grep 'Creation Date'

He didn’t say how many minutes.

It was more than one minute.

just a figure of speech

Priorities. /s