Dan Q

I'm Dan Q. I've spent the last 25+ years creating and writing on the Internet.

I work at Automattic and volunteer with Three Rings. I live with my partner, her husband, two kids and a dog. I can sometimes be found out geo*ing, cycling, or performing magic.

I believe in open source, open relationships, and opening doors to marginalised groups.

Photograph of Dan, his ponytail hanging over the shoulder of his black t-shirt, smiling from behind his beard and waving to the camera.

  • Bad Names for Servers

    Not for the first time, our eldest child has drawn me a network diagram. It's cute, but I've outright refused to name one of the new servers I'm provisioning after our dog. Here's why... Read more →

  • Nex in CapsulePress

    I've extended CapsulePress to support Nex, an ultra-lightweight smolweb protocol from the Nightfall City community. Read more →

  • Firsts and Lasts

    I was listening to the bats flying silently above me while I watched the Perseids, the other month. When was the last time I was actually capable of hearing their echolocation? I simply can't remember, because it didn't feel significant at the time. Read more →

  • Meetup Magic

    As I come to the end of a week in Mexico with ~400 of my the smartest, friendliest, open-source-loving geeks I could wish to know, I come to realise that Automattic's meetups are just... magical. Read more →

  • We'll Pay You to Go (so we're confident in who stays...)

    This week, Automattic made a very generous offer to employees who didn't feel aligned with the company and its leader: to pay them to leave. 8.4% of the company took it, and it's been a heartbreaking time, but we'll build back stronger, I'm sure. Read more →

  • Digital Dustbusting

    I've been doing a bit of tidying-up of the mess that is my personal Internet hosting. I've made a lot of progress, but the rest is probably going to have to wait until later in the year. Read more →

  • What if Emails were Multilingual?

    Wouldn't it be nice if there were a standard for multilingual emails? Oh wait, there is! Let's see how it works, and whether it's (ever going to be) ready for mainstream use... Read more →

  • WP Engine's Three Problems

    Matt Mullenweg kicked off a battle of words between Automattic and the WordPress Foundation and hosting company WP Engine. Without weighing in on the legal aspects (IANAL), I've written up my thoughts. Read more →

  • D20 with Advantage

    D&D players spend a lot of time rolling D20s. Sometimes they 'roll with advantage' - that is, roll two dice and take the largest. Last night I dreamed I derived the probability matrix for such rolls, and it got me thinking... could you construct a single die that rolls 'D20 with Advantage'? Read more →

  • More articles →
    (articles are traditional long-form blog posts)

  • Subscribe for email updates, or discover other ways to subscribe:

    Email no more than

  • Geohashing expedition 2024-10-22 51 -1

    My sabbatical might give me more time for geohashing, so long as the numbers come up right. So let's take an expedition up Harcourt Hill with the dog (plus video)... Read more →

  • Note #24772

    Day #2 of my sabbatical had a morning in which I’ve mostly been roped into some charity-related digital forensics… until I got distracted by dndle.app, which apparently I accidentally broke yesterday! Move Fast and Fix Things! × Read more →

  • Note #24767

    Kicking off day #1 of my three-month sabbatical from work at a hotel in Reading, at a meeting with fellow Three Rings volunteers to discuss our organisational culture and values.

  • Post: Fixing BBC News... Yet Again

    The Beeb continue to keep adding more and more non-news content to the BBC News RSS feed (like this ad for the iPlayer app!), so I've once again had to update my script to "fix" the feed so that it only contains, y'know, news.

  • Wrote note for GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing

    Checked-in in this cache to ensure it was still healthy, after a recent spate of muggling. Happy to report the cache is well. Read more →

  • ✅ Inbox Zero
    ✅ Slack Notification Zero
    ✅ Assigned PR Reviews Zero
    ✅ Owned PRs... one, but it's approved and just waiting for the right moment to merge

    That's got the be the first time in... literally years... that I've ended a workday so "clean". Feels amazing.

    There'll be a mess again tomorrow, but hopefully only of a manageable size because I'm particularly clean to finish this week at "Work Zero". Read more →

  • Happy International Pronouns Day! 🥳 I use he/him pronouns. Read more →

  • Post: Facebook AI Training Opt-Out

    And while we're talking about AI... it took a disproportionate about of time to find the right (tiny) link, but eventually I managed to opt-out of my content being used to train Facebook's AI. They don't make it easy, do they? Read more →

  • Google turns to nuclear to power AI data centres

    As Google invest in next-generation nuclear generation to provide electricity to their energy-hungry AI datacentres, so they can keep providing shit answers to everyday questions, I'm optimistic that maybe after the LLM fad fizzles out we'll be left with new power technologies that can benefit all of humankind. Read more →

  • Note #24735

    You know that you REALLY needed that coffee when you:1. get out a mug, 2. turn on the coffee machine, 3. load the dishwasher while you wait for the coffee machine to warm up, 4. can’t find your mug any more, oh shit it’s in the dishwasher 🤦 × Read more →

  • eBay UK have changed their terms to (a) remove seller fees for most private sellers, but (b) instead of paying-out immediately, payouts are four times a year (or on-demand).That sounds like they’re trying to keep money in their ecosystem. The hope is, I guess, that by paying sellers in virtual “eBay Pounds” rather than actual […] Read more →

  • This evening I pushed against my illness-addled brain to try to sit in on the fortnightly Zoom call with the Three Rings dev team. Unfortunately it seems like the primary symptom of my cold is an inability to string words together.At one point, I apologised to by colleague “Beff” (I meant “Bev”, but I had […] Read more →

  • London Transport 25

    Girl on the Net diverts from her usual sex blogging to write about taking a date on a 25-forms-of-transport tour of London, and it's delightful. Read more →

  • Note #24701

    Playing simultaneous games against both children might have been less challenging if they hadn’t both kept trying to start fights with one another at the same time! 😂× Read more →

  • Calm after the storm

    Rosie, who like me never even considered taking Automattic's alignment offer, writes about her experience of this week's meetup. Read more →

  • More posts →
    (of all kinds: articles, checkins, notes, reposts...)