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.
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Building another secret cabinet
When I was ten, I'd have killed to have a secret compartment hidden in my bedroom bookshelves. And once she'd seen the one I built for my own room, earlier this year, my ten-year-old predictably wanted one of her own, too. Luckily I had the spare parts and, now, the experience to make her one. Awesome. Read more →
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International Volunteer Day
It's International Volunteer Day, and thanks to being on sabbatical I got to spend most of the day volunteering with Three Rings. I liveblogged everything I got up to in a series of notes to try to shine a light on what volunteering (in a developer/devops role) with Three Rings can look like; this post is a summary of all that liveblogging, plus a few extra thoughts. Read more →
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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. Read more →
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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. Read more →
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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. Read more →
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Horse-Powered Locomotives
You probably know the story of George Stephenson's Rocket beating its competitors and going to to influence steam locomotive design for generations. But did you know that one of its competitors... was a horse in a carriage? Read more →
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US Constitution and Presidential Assassinations
A thought came to me this morning: if a US President-Elect dies before their inauguration, does their running mate automatically get the Presidency? Finding the answer led me through a warren of interconnected Constitutional Amendments. Read more →
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Sadder Than Fiction
There's a short story that I tried on-and-off to write, but I've now given up on it. The concepts it makes light of all feel a bit too close-to-home, as conspiracy theorists increasingly migrate from the 'harmless nutjob' to the 'dangerous political leader' category. Read more →
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XPath Scraping AdamKoszary.co.uk
My old colleague Adam's started blogging again, but his blog doesn't have an RSS feed. Which means it's time for some more XPath Scraping in FreshRSS, and an excuse for me to explain the testing and debugging process I use when making XPath Scraping rulesets! Read more →
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More articles →
(articles are traditional long-form blog posts) -
Today I learned that you can use reportValidity() on a HTML5 input of e.g. type="email" to force the browser to run it's own validation, without waiting for the containing form to be submitted (which in some cases might not happen, e.g. if you're handling input using JS).
That's cool. Read more → -
Today, while I cooked dinner, I introduced my two children (aged 10 and 8) to Goat Simulator.
Within half an hour, they'd added an imaginative twist and a role-playing element. My eldest had decreed themselves Angel of Goats and the younger Goat Devil and the two were locked in an endless battle to control the holy land at the top of a rollercoaster.
The shrieks of joy and surprise from the living room could be heard throughout the entire house. Perhaps our whole village. Read more → -
Maybe Later
"Install update" Maybe later. An excellent... I want to say poem?... from Ian Eure. Read more →
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Even when this... even when that... even when the other.
Even then, there's still the comfort of a bacon sarnie for breakfast. 😋 Read more → -
Here in Oxfordshire we’re nowhere near the epicentre of Storm Darragh, but we’re still feeling the effects. A huge tree came down and blocked the Thorney Leys road in Witney near Burwell Meadow and the kids and I needed to take an ad-hoc diversion.🤞 Fingers crossed for all my friends and family in worse-hit places! Read more →
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Recreational programming
Foone shares that "the world needs more recreational programming". I agree. Read more →
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For my final bit of Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day, I'm working on improving the UI of a new upcoming feature: a spreadsheet-like page that makes it easy for administrators to edit the details of many volunteers simultaneously. Read more →
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Even when it's technical, not all of my International Volunteer Day work for Three Rings has been spent using our key technologies. Today, I found myself writing PHP for a WordPress-powered contact form. Read more →
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My Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day isn't all technical work. It's also time to process the incoming postal mail. Read more →
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As well as the programming tasks I'm working on for Three Rings this International Volunteer Day, I'm also doing a little devops. We've got a new server architecture rolling out next week, and I'm tasked with ensuring that the logging on them meets our security standards. Read more →
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Not every code review is fireworks, but many provide opportunities for collaboration, discussion, learning from one another, and volunteer-empowerment. Like this one... Read more →
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Good news! It turns out that the new code to fix the mail merge fields in Three Rings doesn't introduce an inconsistency with established behaviour. It was important to check, but it turns out all is well. I touched bases with fellow volunteers on Slack to confirm the news. Read more →
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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. Sometimes you just need some hands-on testing! Read more →
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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.
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)! Read more → -
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. Read more →
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More posts →
(of all kinds:
articles, 
checkins, 
notes, 
reposts...)