Author: Dan Q
Dan Q is a software engineer, a director of a voluntary organisation, a trainee counsellor, a keen geocacher, and an amateur magician. He lives with his partner and her husband in a polyamorous triad, and occasionally finds time to blog.
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My first task this International Volunteer Day is to test a pull request that aims to fix a bug with Three Rings' mail merge fields functionality. As it's planned to be a hotfix (direct into production) we require extra rigor and more reviewers than code that just goes into the main branch for later testing on our beta environment.
My concern is that fixing this bug might lead to a regression not described by our automated tests, so I'm rolling back to a version from a couple of months ago to compare the behaviour of the affected tool then and now. Sometimes you just need some hands-on testing!
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Screenshot showing web application Three Rings viewed on a local development machine, being used to compose an email about International Volunteer Day. A merge field called 'first_name' is included in the email, and it's hand-annotated with the question 'working?'. Alongside, GitHub Desktop shows that we've rolled-back to a revision from two months ago.
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Happy International Volunteer Day! Volunteering rocks.
As I'm on sabbatical, I'm in the lucky position of being able to spend most of the day on a volunteer project very close to my heart: Three Rings. Three Rings is a 22-year-old web-based service produced by volunteers, for volunteers. The software service we produce supports the efforts of around 60,000 volunteers working at charities and other voluntary organisations around the globe.
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Dan, a white man with a goatee-style beard and long hair tied back, wearing a black t-shirt with an abstract pride rainbow, holds a mug of coffee in one hand and gives a thumbs-up with the other. Behind him, three computer screens show a mixture of code, source control, chat, email, and web browser windows. His desk is cluttered.
I'll be posting throughout the day about some of the different tasks I take on. My volunteer role with Three Rings is primarily a developer/devops one, but it takes all sorts to make a project like this work (even if my posts look biased towards the technical stuff)!
But first: coffee.
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A Friend Used AI to Wish me Happy Birthday
Robert shares his experience of receiving a birthday greeting from a friend, that had clearly been written by an AI. I echo his sentiment.
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Babies and Baubles
Each year, we encourage our two children to each select exactly one new bauble to add to our tree. The result is a decoration that's a celebration of the changing tastes and interests of our two kinds: a mismatched, discordant, crazy mixture of colours and shapes, but in which each and every item is its own story.
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kirby vs. this blog post
mgx shows off a cute use of Javascript to make a fun blog post post more-fun, all the while helping to keep the Internet fun and weird.
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TFW a recipe calls for a glass of wine but you can't get the cork back in the bottle so you just have to drink the rest of it.
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Dan, in a kitchen with some kind of tomato sauce on a hob behind him, holds a glass of red wine and shrugs at the camera.
Ah well, what's a chef to do? 🤷🍷
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Not quite ready for wintering indoors, our village's hardy sheep are enjoying pasturing in the large field near the school this beautiful but chilly morning.
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Warm colours break through scattered clouds from a winter sunrise over sheep grazing in a scrubby pasture.
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99 Days of Blogging
I've blogged a total of 219 posts spanning 99 consecutive days of blogging, a personal best by a long stretch.
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In good news, my injured arm is not broken and should recover within a couple of weeks.
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Dan, wearing a sling, stands near the reception of a Minor Injuries Unit.
In amusing news, the doctor who treated me recognised me from (tales of) my electric shock admission earlier in the year, even though she never treated me on that ocassion.
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Stuck in a Lift
About twenty years ago, I spent three hours playing I-Spy in a broken-down elevator. And in doing so, I learned two things about my friend Fiona.
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I'm leaving Ireland a day late, from the wrong airport, and with one fewer functioning arm than I anticipated. It's been quite the ride. I'll be glad to get home.
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Dan sits in an airport bar drinking a beer held in his right hand. His left arm is in a sling.
(for those that are concerned: I've damaged my shoulder, possibly while slipping down a hill in search of a geocache or geohashpoint; so, y'know, the usual reason I get injured... but I've got some physio instructions I'm supposed to follow, and I'll be okay)
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Sooo... I'm in Dublin.
I missed me flight at Knock airport, which turns out to have been the only plane leaving that tiny airport today. So I arranged a flight from Dublin tomorrow, extended my car rental and arranged to drop it off in the capital's airport instead, and zipped over here.
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Two pints of Guinness on a candlelit table.
Now I'm in an underlit bar sipping a Guinness and waiting for a pizza.
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Found GC8XWKX Shamrock #20
This checkin to GC8XWKX Shamrock #20 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. My mum and I have been visiting Ireland on a geohashing & geocaching expedition. We'd spotted this shamrock shape but it wasn't in our operating zone so we didn't get a chance to hunt any of them, until …
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Found GC8E8A0 Challenge 💖 Virtual x 15 💖 Country x 5 💖
This checkin to GC8E8A0 Challenge 💖 Virtual x 15 💖 Country x 5 💖 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. I've never much gone for 'challenge caches'. Mostly they just bug me when I fail to filter them off my map and only end up realising that I'm arbitrarily disallowed …
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Geohashing expedition 2024-11-27 53 -8
A sixth Irish geohashing trip in Ireland spelled disaster. The hashpoint itself was easy, but we missed our flight back to the UK and ended up having to road-trip our way coast-to-coast to get back to somewhere we could catch a plane in the morning...