Harder than I might have expected to navigate my way around the winding paths and alleyways surrounding this courtyard – I found myself within 10 metres of the cache at one point, but
on the wrong side of a fence and hedge, and had to walk all the way around the block before I found my way in!
Cache is overlooked by lots of houses, so a great deal of care was required so as not to attract the attention of muggles. Thankfully I’d come early on a Sunday morning, before most
folks were up (I’d woken earlier than my colleagues at the conference centre where I’d spent the weekend, and thought I’d hit a local cache before breakfast).
Found it in the end, though: hurrah! Pencil’s looking a little blunt, and I didn’t have a sharpener, but managed to sign the log despite this. TFTC!
This blog post is the third in a series about buying our first house. In the
third post, Ruth, JTA and I had acquired some
lawyers and started the conveyancing process…
We’re moving house! And we want your help!
There’ve been… a few hitches with the house move. A few little hurdles. And then a few big hurdles. It’s been a little challenging, is what I’m trying to say. I’ll write about that in
Part 5, but for now: we need your help!
Here’s what we’ve got:
A weekend in which we want to move (27th – 28th July).
A van (probably).
A lot of furniture, piles of boxes, and all the board games in the
known universe. – a lot of stuff!
A couple of extra pairs of hands who are willing to load and unload vans in exchange for:
Pizza
All the booze you can eat
Being among the first to see our new home!
(cynical folks might notice that pizza, booze, rental vans and friends are a lot cheaper than professional removals companies, especially for short hops across to the other side of
a city)
Simply put: we need you!
Can you help? Can you be free for some or all of the weekend of 27th & 28th of July, to come and shift boxes in exchange for good times, booze and snacks? If you are, we’d love to have
you over. Ruth has written more about the wonderful perks that
you’ll enjoy if you can help us, so – if you’re free and can get to Oxford – please come! And it’ll be lovely to see you, too!
At the end of 2012, I shared some sad news: that Ruth and JTA had suffered a miscarriage. It was a tragic end
to a tragic year.
I just wanted to share with you something that we’ve all kept quiet about until now, until we all felt confident that we weren’t likely to have a repeat of that tragedy: as Ruth just mentioned on her blog, too, she’s pregnant again! With a due date of New Year’s
Eve there’s plenty of time for us to get settled into our new house before
then, but it looks like she’s still going to find herself excused of all of the heavy lifting during the move.
Needless to say, this is all incredibly exciting news on New Earth, and we’ve had to bite our tongues sometimes to not tell people about it. Apologies to those of you who’ve invited us
to things (e.g. at Christmas and New Years’) that we’ve had to quietly turn down without explanation – at least now you know!
I’m sure there’ll be lots to say over the coming months. I can’t promise as thorough updates as Siân‘s fantastic
pregnancy blogging, but we’ll see what we can do.
This is my video review of the second episode of Godzilla Huntley’s (Captain AvAngel) blog series, Family Vlog. See the
original.
With such a long video to review, I had to budget my time to watch and review it. This means that you’ll see me at home, at work, travelling by foot, and travelling by car, as I hop
around and try to find snippets of time to watch it (and to record myself talking about it).
Hot on the heels of our long weekend in Jersey, and right after the live deployment of Three
Rings‘ Milestone: Krypton, came
another trip away: I’ve spent very little time in Oxford, lately! This time around, though, it was an experimental new activity that we’ve inserted into the Three Rings
calendar: Dev Training.
We rented a secluded cottage to which we could whisk away our prospective new developers. By removing day-to-day distractions at work and home, our thinking was that we could fully
immerse them in coding.
The format wasn’t unfamiliar: something that we’ve done before, to great success, is to take our dedicated volunteer programmers away on a “Code Week”: getting everybody together in one
place, on one network, and working 10-14 hour days, hammering out code to help streamline charity rota management. Sort-of like a LAN party, except instead of games, we do
work. The principle of Code Week is to turn volunteer developers, for a short and intense burst, in to machines that turn sugar into software. If you get enough talented people
around enough computers, with enough snacks, you can make miracles happen.
I’m not certain that the driveway was really equipped for the number of cars we brought. But I don’t get on terribly well with laptops, so clearly I was going to bring a desktop
computer. And a second desktop computer, just in case. And that takes up a lot of seat space.
In recent years, Three Rings has expanded significantly. The test team has exploded; the support team now has to have a rota of their own in order to keep track of who’s
working when; and – at long last – the development team was growing, too. New developers, we decided, needed an intensive session of hands-on training before they’d be set loose on
real, production code… so we took the principles of Code Week, and turned it into a boot camp for our new volunteers!
New developers Rich, Chris, and Mike set up their development environments. Owing to the complexity of the system, this can be a long part of the course (or, at least, it feels that
way!).
Recruiting new developers has always been hard for us, for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that we’ve always exclusively recruited from people who use the system. The thinking
is that if you’re already a volunteer at, say, a helpline or a community library or a fireboat-turned-floating-museum or any of the other organisations that use Three Rings, then you already understand why what we
do is important and valuable, and why volunteer work is the key to making it all happen. That’s the bit of volunteering that’s hardest to ‘teach’, so the thinking is that by making it a
prerequisite, we’re always moving in the right direction – putting volunteering first in our minds. But unfortunately, the pool of people who can program computers to a satisfactory
standard is already pretty slim (and the crossover between geeks and volunteers is, perhaps, not so large as you might like)… this makes recruitment for the development
team pretty hard.
Turfed out of the Ops Centre and into the living room, JTA works on important tasks like publicity, future posts on the Three Rings blog, and ensuring that we all remember to eat at
some point.
A second difficulty is that Three Rings is a hard project to get involved with, as a newbie. Changing decisions in development convention, a mess of inter-related (though
thankfully not inter-depedent) components, and a sprawling codebase make getting started as a developer more than a little intimidating. Couple that with all of the things our
developers need to know and understand before they get started (MVC, RoR, TDD, HTML, CSS, SQL, DiD… and that’s just the acronyms!), and you’ve got a learning curve that’s close to vertical. Our efforts to integrate
new developers without a formal training program had met with limited success, because almost nobody already has the exact set of skills we’re looking for: that’s how we knew it was
time to make Dev Training Weekend a reality.
Conveniently, there was a pub literally just out the gate from the back garden of the cottage, which proved incredibly useful when we (finally) downed tools and went out for a drink.
We’d recruited three new potential developers: Mike, Rich, and Chris. As fits our pattern, all are current or former volunteers from organisations that use Three Rings. One of them had
been part of our hard-working support team for a long time, and the other two were more-new to Three Rings in general. Ruth and I ran a series of workshops covering Ruby, Rails, Test-Driven Development, Security, and so on, alternated between stretches of supervised
“hands-on” programming, tackling genuine Three Rings bugs and feature requests. We felt that it was important that the new developers got the experience of making a real difference,
right from the second or the third day, they’d all made commits against the trunk (under the careful review of a senior developer, of course).
Mike demonstrates test-driven development, down at the local pub: 1. touch cat 2. assert cat.purring? When the test fails, of course, the debugging challenge begins: is the problem
with the test, the touch, or the cat?
We were quite pleased to discover that all three of them took a particular interest early on in different parts of the system. Of course, we made sure that each got a full and
well-rounded education, but we found that they were all most-interested in different areas of the system (Comms, Stats, Rota, etc.), and different layers of development (database,
business logic, user interface, etc.). It’s nice to see people enthused about the system, and it’s infectious: talking with some of these new developers about what
they’d like to contribute has really helped to inspire me to take a fresh look at some of the bits that I’m responsible for, too.
Chris drip-feeds us fragments of his life in computing and in volunteering; and praises Ruby for being easier, at least, than programming using punchcards.
It was great to be able to do this in person. The Three Rings team – now about a dozen of us in the core team, with several dozen more among our testers – is increasingly geographically
disparate, and rather than face-to-face communication we spend a lot of our time talking to each other via instant messengers, email, and through the comments and commit-messages of our
ticketing and source control systems! But there’s nothing quite like being able to spend a (long, hard) day sat side-by-side with a fellow coder, cracking through some infernal bug or
another and talking about what you’re doing (and what you expect to achieve with it) as you go.
Chris, Mike and Rich discuss some aspect or another of Three Rings development.
I didn’t personally get as much code written as I’d have liked. But I was pleased to have been able to support three new developers, who’ll go on to collectively achieve more than I
ever will. It’s strange to look back at the early 2000s, when it was just me writing Three
Rings (and Kit testing/documenting most of it: or, at least, distracting me with facts about Hawaii while I was trying to write
the original Wiki feature!). Nowadays Three Rings is a bigger (and more-important) system than ever before, supporting tens of thousands of volunteers at hundreds of voluntary
organisations spanning five time zones.
I’ve said before how much
it blows my mind that what began in my bedroom over a decade ago has become so critical, and has done so much good for so many people. And it’s still true today: every time I think
about it, it sends my head spinning. If that’s what it’s done in the last ten years, what’llitdo in the next ten?
Went up the PYG track this weekend with the TransAid team, raising money in memory of my father (who was killed when he fell from a cliff last year, while in training for a sponsored
trip to the North Pole). Whlie the stragglers made their way up to the summit, I whipped out my GPSr and found this wonderful little cache (pretty sure it wasn’t here when I last came
up Snowdon, in early 2006).
A glorious day, marred only by the ludicrous number of walkers that had come out to make the most of it – the top was heaving with people!
Didn’t have a pen with me, and there wasn’t one in the cache. I’ve taken a photo of myself holding the cache (which I’ll provide on-demand, but in order not to spoil the cache for
others I’ve not included it: instead see attached a photo of my group at the summit – I’m the guy at the front with his arms out; I’ve just run up from where the cache is in order to
get into the picture at the last second!).
Things like this robot, painted onto the door of the bathrooms of a hipsterish East Oxford bar.
(it looks like one of the robot’s eyes fell off before the bar‘s owners Instragram’d it)
See the robot? THE ROBOT SEES YOU NOW!
There are those who would argue that this isn’t true eyebombing, because I ought to be sticking eyes to non-anthropomorphic, inanimate objects, and making them look alive by
doing so. But the folks on /r/eyebombing don’t seem to mind: they’re far more-focused on the
chaos and hilarity that ensues when you just put eyes on any damn thing that looks like it could benefit from them.
This guy’s so angry he’s popping his eyes out of his head!
When I was on holiday in Jersey, for example, I found an unattended rack of tourist information
leaflets that were just crying out for a ‘bombing.
“Does this dress make my eyes look fat?”
And because I pretty-much carry googly eyes around with me all the time – in the pocket that generally contains my headphones, a pen, a hair tie, and other everyday essentials – I
started sticking eyes onto things.
Soon.
The game didn’t stop even when I touched back down on the mainland.
Sign at the toilets in the arrivals lounge of Gatwick Airport.
