There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻
Author: Dan Q
What breaks?
What breaks when one of your developers leaves?
On Friday, I said goodbye to a colleague as she left us after most of a decade with the company. Then this morning, all hell broke loose on some production servers.
It turns out that the API key that connected our application to our feature flag management platform was associated with her account, and hadn’t shown up in the exit audit.
Let this be your reminder to go check where, if anywhere, your applications are using person-specific keys where they should be using generic ones!
Dan Q found GCBN167 Ivy Believe It’s Up There!
This checkin to GCBN167 Ivy Believe It's Up There! reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
This afternoon I’m acting as backup driver for my partner Ruth, who’s walking the length of the Thames Path by (very gradual) instalments. Having parked at Culham Lock I began to walk back towards Abingdon to meet the walking team coming the other way, when I noticed that a new cache had been published nearby and diverted to find it.
A delightful tree climb later and I had this great cache container in hand. TFTC, FP awarded!
Dan Q did not find GC3KQK2 RRR10
This checkin to GC3KQK2 RRR10 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
A little sad to DNF this cache which is probably just well-hidden, but I’ve only got limited time to hunt as I’m the backup driver for this segment of a walk down the entire length of the Thames Path.
Finding the right Bottom Hole paper
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
On the 6th of January 1995, viewers of BBC Two were treated to a new series of
Waiting for GodotBottom. Stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel,Vyvyan and the People’s PoetEddie and Ritchie wait to see what the cruel hand of fate has dealt them in this week’s episode “Hole”.At one point,
Captain Edrison PeaveyEdward Elizabeth Hitler pulls out a newspaper to read.
It may surprise you to know that the “Hammersmith Bugle” is not a real paper and they never ran a headline “No News Shocker”. At which point, it is time to rip off Dirty Feed’s shtick and find out what that paper really is.
…
This is exactly the kind of rabbitholey deep-dive I know and love (and have experienced ever so frequently myself). Take a ride with Terence on a long (and not-entirely satisfying!) ride to try to find the actual newspaper that’s been adapted by the Bottom production team in this particular episodes.
Anyway, it’s an amusing journey that I enjoyed going along with, this morning, and maybe you will too.
Personal Location Tracking FTW
I took the dog out for a walk from the Chicory House yesterday. At one point, we found ourselves on a familiar-looking footpath: I couldn’t place exactly why I’d been there before. Geocaching, possibly: I couldn’t see any on the map but perhaps they’d been since archived?
Fortunately, I maintain a personal tracklog of virtually everywhere I’ve been in the last decade or two, so I was able to run a quick query and discover that I’d walked out here on a geohashing expedition in 2024.
Personal location tracking continues to be awesome. Being able to both forwards-search (“where was I on this date?”) and reverse-search (“when was I last within this area?”) unlocks a wealth of aides mémoire that are otherwise hard to come by.
It’s hard to sell people on the idea, probably because it’s a slow-burner – you need lots of data before it starts to pay off! – but I still recommend it.
FlipFlop Solitaire’s Deck-Generation Secret
For the last few years, my go-to mobile game1 has been FlipFlop Solitaire.
The game
The premise is simple enough:
- 5-column solitaire game with 1-5 suits.
- 23 cards dealt out into those columns; only the topmost ones face-up.
- 2 “reserve” cards retained at the bottom.
- Stacks can be formed atop any suit based on value-adjacency (in either order, even mixing the ordering within a stack)
- Individual cards can always be moved, but stacks can only be moved if they share a value-adjacency chain and are all the same suit.
- Aim is to get each suit stacked in order at the top.
One of the things that stands out to me is that the game comes with over five thousand pre-shuffled decks to play, all of which guarantee that they are “winnable”.
Playing through these is very satisfying because it means that if you get stuck, you know that it’s because of a choice that you made2, and not (just) because you get unlucky with the deal.
Every deck is “winnable”?
When I first heard that every one of FlipFlop‘s pregenerated decks were winnable, I misinterpreted it as claiming that every conceivable shuffle for a game of FlipFlop was winnable. But that’s clearly not the case, and it doesn’t take significant effort to come up with a deal that’s clearly not-winnable. It only takes a single example to disprove a statement!
That it’s possible for a fairly-shuffled deck of cards to lead to an “unwinnable” game of FlipFlop Solitaire means the author must have necessarily had some mechanism to differentiate between “winnable” (which are probably the majority) and “unwinnable” ones. And therein lies an interesting problem.
If the only way to conclusively prove that a particular deal is “winnable” is to win it, then the developer must have had an algorithm that they were using to test that a given deal was “winnable”: that is – a brute-force solver.
So I had a go at making one3. The code is pretty hacky (don’t judge me) and, well… it takes a long, long time.
Partially that’s because the underlying state engine I used, BfsBruteForce, is a breadth-first optimising algorithm. It aims to find the absolute fewest-moves solution, which isn’t necessarily the fastest one to find because it means that it has to try all of the “probably stupid” moves it finds4 with the same priority as the the “probably smart” moves5.
I played about with enhancing it with some heuristics, and scoring different play states, and then running that in a pruned depth-first way, but it didn’t really help much. It came to an answer eventually, sure… but it took a long, long time, and it’s pretty easy to see why: the number of permutations for a shuffled deck of cards is greater than the number of atoms on Earth!
If you pull off a genuinely random shuffle, then – statistically-speaking – you’ve probably managed to put that deck into an order that no deck of cards has never been in before!6
And sure: the rules of the game reduce the number of possibilities quite considerably… but there’s still a lot of them.
So how are “guaranteed winnable” decks generated?
I think I’ve worked out the answer to this question: it came to me in a dream!
The trick to generating “guaranteed winnable” decks for FlipFlop Solitaire (and, probably, any similar game) is to work backwards.
Instead of starting with a random deck and checking if it’s solvable by performing every permutation of valid moves… start with a “solved” deck (with all the cards stacked up neatly) and perform a randomly-selected series of valid reverse-moves! E.g.:
- The first move is obvious: take one of the kings off the “finished” piles and put it into a column.
- For the next move, you’ll either take a different king and do the same thing, or take the queen that was exposed from under the first king and place it either in an empty column or atop the first king (optionally, but probably not, flipping the king face down).
- With each subsequent move, you determine what the valid next-reverse-moves are, choose one at random (possibly with some kind of weighting), and move on!
In computational complexity theory, you just transformed an NP-Hard problem7 into a P problem.
Once you eliminate repeat states and weight the randomiser to gently favour moving “towards” a solution that leaves the cards set-up and ready to begin the game, you’ve created a problem that may take an indeterminate amount of time… but it’ll be finite and its complexity will scale linearly. And that’s a big improvement.
I started implementing a puzzle-creator that works in this manner, but the task wasn’t as interesting as the near-impossible brute-force solver so I gave up, got distracted, and wrote some even more-pointless code instead.
If you go ahead and make an open source FlipFlop deck generator, let me know: I’d be interested to play with it!
Footnotes
1 I don’t get much time to play videogames, nowadays, but I sometimes find that I’ve got time for a round or two of a simple “droppable” puzzle game while I’m waiting for a child to come out of school or similar. FlipFlop Solitaire is one of only three games I have installed on my phone for this purpose, the other two – both much less frequently-played – being Battle of Polytopia and the buggy-but-enjoyable digital version of Twilight Struggle.
2 Okay, it feels slightly frustrating when you make a series of choices that are perfectly logical and the most-rational decision under the circumstances. But the game has an “undo” button, so it’s not that bad.
3 Mostly I was interested in whether such a thing was possible, but folks who’re familiar with how much I enjoy “cheating” at puzzles (don’t get me started on Jigidi jigsaws…) by writing software to do them for me will also realise that this is Just What I Am Like.
4 An example of a “probably stupid” move would be splitting a same-suit stack in order to sit it atop a card of a different suit, when this doesn’t immediately expose any new moves. Sometimes – just sometimes – this is an optimal strategy, but normally it’s a pretty bad idea.
5 Moving a card that can go into the completed stacks at the top is usually a good idea… although just sometimes, and especially in complex mid-game multi-suit scenarios, it can be beneficial to keep a card in play so that you can use it as an anchor for something else, thereby unblocking more flexible play down the line.
6 Fun fact: shuffling a deck of cards is a sufficient source of entropy that you can use it to generate cryptographic keystreams, as Bruce Schneier demonstrated in 1999.
7 I’ve not thought deeply about it, but determining if a given deck of cards will result in a winnable game probably lies somewhere between the travelling salesman and the halting problem, in terms of complexity, right? And probably not something a right-thinking person would ask their desktop computer to do for fun!
Flossed
Today, for the first time ever, I reached the end of a roll if dental floss without first losing or giving up on it.
Chicory House, Real Coffee, Flooded Keyboard
As if I hadn’t suffered enough “flood damage” this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup – hour the first time in months! – in our rental… by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱
Chicory, Coffee, and Code
Now that we’ve finished our move into the Chicory House, I have for the first time in over two months been able to set up my preferred coding environment… with a proper monitor on a proper desk with a proper office chair. Bliss!
My Salary History
Jeremy Keith posted his salary history last week. I absolutely agree with him that employers exploit the information gap created by opaque salary advertisement, and I think that our industry of software engineering is especially troublesome for this.
So I’m joining him (and others) in choosing to share my salary history. I’ve set up a new page for that purpose, but here’s the summary of its initial state:
Understand
A few understandings and caveats:
- For most of my career I’ve described myself as a “Full-Stack Web Applications Developer”, but I’ve worked outside of every one of those words and my job titles have often been more like “CMS Developer” or “Senior Engineer (Security)”.
- My specialisms and “hot areas” are security engineering, web standards, performance, and accessibility.
- When I worked multiple roles in a year, I’ve tried to capture that, but there’ll be some fuzziness around the edges.
- The salaries are rounded slightly to make nice readable numbers.
- I’ve not always worked full-time; all salaries are translated into “full-time equivalent”1.
- I’ve only included jobs that fit into my software engineering career2.
- If the table below looks out-of-date then I’ve probably just forgotten to update it. Let me know!
History
| Year | Employer | Salary | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 – 2026 | Firstup | £80,000 | Remote. + Stock (spread over four years). |
| 2024 – 2025 | Automattic | £111,000 | Remote. + Stock (one-off bonus, worth ~£6,000). |
| 2023 | Automattic | £103,000 | Remote. |
| 2021 – 2022 | Automattic | £98,000 | Remote |
| 2019 – 2020 | Automattic | £89,000 | Remote. |
| 2015 – 2019 | Bodleian Libraries + Freelance | £39,000 | Hybrid. |
| 2011 – 2014 | Bodleian Libraries | £36,000 | Practices salary transparency! ❤️ |
| 2010 – 2011 | SmartData + Freelance | £26,000 | Remote. |
| 2007 – 2009 | SmartData | £24,000 | |
| 2004 – 2006 | SmartData | £19,500 | |
| 2002 – 2003 | SmartData | £16,500 | Alongside full-time study. |
| 2002 | CTA | £18,000 | |
| 2001 | Freelance | £4,500 |
Ad-hoc and hard to estimate.
Alongside full-time study. |
What does that look like?
I drew a graph, but I don’t like it. Mostly because I don’t see my salary as a “goal” to aim for or some kind of “score”.
It’s gone up; it’s gone down; but I’ve always been more-motivated by what I’m working on, with whom, and for what purpose than I have been on how much I get paid for it3. But if you want to see:
I’m not sure to what degree my career looks typical or not. But I guess I also don’t care! My motivations are probably different than most (a little-more idealistic, a little-less capitalistic), I’d guess.
Footnotes
1 i.e. what I’d have earned if I had worked full-time
2 That summer back in college that I worked in a factory building striplight fittings doesn’t appear, for example!
3 Pro-tip if you’re looking at my CV and pitching me an opportunity: mention what you expect to pay, sure, but if you’re trying to win me over then tell me about the problems I’ll be solving and how that’ll make the world a better place. That’s how you motivate me to accept your offer!
Good morning, Goldfinch
A goldfinch came to my bedroom window to say hi, this morning. Good morning, Goldfinch!
Chicory Keys
Towards the end of last week we picked up the keys to the Chicory House.1 We’ve now officially moved in to the place we’ll be calling home for the next six months or so, while we wait for our Actual House to be repaired following our catastrophic flood in February.2
As part of my efforts to travel light, I use a pretty small wallet – a lump of carbon fibre about the size of a deck of cards3 that contains my ID, bank cards, and – in pocket at the back – my essential keys. Typically that’s my front door key and my bike lock key.
And so when I received my front door key to the Chicory House, I had to decide: where does this key belong?
The obvious answer would have been to remove the front door key for my actual home from its special place within my wallet and replace it with the Chicory House’s front door key. That’s the one I’ll need most-often for the foreseeable future, right? My regular front door key can move to the supplementary hook, on a ring, and/or be removed entirely and taken with me only when I need to visit my uninhabitable home.
But that’s not what I did.
This made sense as an instinctive move: it’s where I’d clip on the key to any of the half-dozen or so AirBnBs I’ve lived in for the last couple of months, after all! But for a house I’m going to live in for half a year or more it doesn’t seem so rational.
But I haven’t put it back. I think I’m keeping it this way. My regular key gets to keep its special spot because it represents the lost status quo and the aspiration to return. Sure, it’s less-practical for me to keep it there, but its position is symbolic, not sensible.
Swapping the two over would feel like giving in: like caving to the inevitability of us being out of our home for an extended period. Keeping the key where it is means that every time I put my hand in my pocket I’m reminded that the current arrangement is temporary; things will go back to normal. And that’s nice.4
Footnotes
1 The house isn’t actually called that, of course. That’s our nickname for it, on account of it being a substitute for the real thing.
2 The flood was exactly two months ago today, which makes today “F-Day plus 60”. We’ve spent most of the intervening time hopping from AirBnB to AirBnB.
3 As somebody who often carries a deck of cards, this is a pretty-convenient size to me!
4 That said, the Chicory House is way better than most of the AirBnB’s we’ve been living in, and I’m especially loving being able to sleep on my own familiar mattress again! While I wouldn’t want to live here forever like I’d be happy to in the place we’ve called home since 2020, it’ll certainly suffice for the immediate future. A stepping-stone back towards the lives we’d built before.
Unpacked Kitchen
Today’s mission in what we’re calling the Chicory House – our home while our actual house gets repaired – was to unpack the kitchen. I think it’s looking pretty good!
Next weekend’s mission will be to set myself up a workspace that isn’t the conservatory dining table. 😬
Reply to: Sent to Coventry: Who is Princess Victor Duleep Singh?
This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.
You clearly feel strongly enough about this point to have committed it to writing.
(It’s obviously a cause that you’re committed to.)
I’m being sarcastic, of course, but there’s a point. While (like most mental health services) I’m not a fan of describing the act of suicide as “committing” suicide today, for exactly the reasons you describe, it might be appropriate for a historical case.
That’s all I meant to say in a comment… but then I ended up going down a rabbithole.
Let’s sidestep into an example: I said “John William Gott committed blasphemy in 1921” that would be fair. His actions would not be considered criminal today: he was initially arrested for selling pamphlets containing information on birth control but prosecutors tacked on a blasphemy charge because they figured they could get it to stick too, based on the ways his literature was presented. But legally-speaking, Gott committed a crime; a crime that doesn’t exist today.
It’s not a coincidence I’ve lumped jumped from suicide to blasphemy: both were formerly criminalised in Britain and her empire (among many other places) as a direct result of Christian religious tradition: you can probably blame Thomas Aquinas!
Language about the criminality of past offences gets very complicated, very quickly. Some contemporary values seem to be considered so fundamental that it feels wrong to describe historical convictions as criminal. In some of these cases, we see pardons issued or other admissions of fault by the state. Take for example in recent years the payment of compensation to former military personnel who were dishonourably discharged on account of their sexuality. But I’m not aware of anything like that happening related to past convictions of suicide (or, indeed, blasphemy).
With that grounding: let’s take a deeper dive into Irene Duleep Singh, to decide whether or not her suicide would have been considered criminal at the time (it was certainly considered shameful and taboo, even within societies that would not have considered it illegal, but that’s not what I’m interested in right now). Irene died by suicide in the Principality f Monaco in 1926. At that time, Monaco was a protectorate of France with less independence than it is today, and for the most part its legal system seems to have paralleled that in France. I can’t find a specific provision for suicide in Monaco, so it would probably not have been illegal (suicide was illegal under the Ancien Régime but was effectively decriminalised by its omission from the Napoleonic Penal Codes). So: no crime.
Buuuut… Irene could also be considered a citizen of Britain, or of India, or of British India. Suicide was illegal in the UK prior to 1961 and in India until 2024 (wait, what? yeah, really… well… kinda; it’s complicated, especially after 2018). So in her capacity as a citizen or subject of the British Empire, her suicide was criminal.
Both John William Gott and Irene Duleep Singh may well both have committed crimes that would not be considered crimes today. In both cases, their crimes were things that, in my opinion, should never have been criminalised in the first place. But that doesn’t make the historical fact any less-true.
And that’s why I picked up on this one line for my comment.
I absolutely agree that it’s inappropriate and unhelpful to talk about somebody have “committed suicide” today. The language creates a barrier to help and support, which is what should be offered to people experiencing suicidal thoughts! But I don’t see the harm in using it when discussing a historical case from a century ago, at a time at which suicide was seen very differently.
So long as it’s appropriately contextualised for the audience, it seems to me to be harmless. By which I mean to say: not worthy of being called-out by your one-liner… and even-less worthy of my having gone down this long and complicated rabbithole which, somehow, has involved translating old French legislation, digging through the history of Monaco, and learning about the courts of the British Raj.
I guess what I mean to say is that if your intention was to nerdsnipe me with this line… then well played, Sundeep, well played.