Day: 5 December 2024

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 (all backed by the usual level of customisation and view/edit permissions that Three Rings is known for).

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Screenshot showing a web page, 'Three Rings Directory - Edit All': a spreadsheet-like view of multiple volunteers, some of whom have had personal details like First Name, Address, or Telephone changed, resulting in these being highlighted and a prompt appearing to allow the changes to be saved/committed.

It's a moderately-popular request, and I can see it being helpful to volunteer coordinators at many different types of voluntary organisation.

Don't have time to write up the test instructions today, though, because I've got to wrap up my volunteering and go do some childwrangling, so that'll do for now!

Even when it's technical, not all of my International Volunteer Day work for Three Rings has been spent using our key technologies (LNMR [Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, Ruby] stacks).

Today, I wrote some extra PHP for our WordPress-powered contact form to notify our Support Team volunteers via Slack when messages are sent. We already aim to respond to every message within 24 hours, 365 days a year, and are often faster than that... but this might help us to be even more-responsive to the needs of the charities who we help look after.

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A filled contact form alongside a Slack message and a resulting ticketing system message.

My Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day isn't all technical work. It's also time to process the incoming postal mail.

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In front of a letterbox, an hand holds an open envelope and a (censored) Danske Bank cheque for £219.

Our time as volunteers may be free, but our servers aren't, so the larger and richer charities that use our services help contribute to our hosting costs. Most send money digitally, but some use dual-signatory accounts that require they send cheques.

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.

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Terminal screenshot showing a directory listing of a logs directory with several gzipped logfiles with different date-stamped suffixes, and the contents of the logrotate configuration file that produced them.

Each server's on-device logs are retained in date-stamped files for 14 days, but they're also backed-up offsite daily.

Those bits all seem to be working, so next I need to work out a way to add a notification to our monitoring platform if any server doesn't successfully push a log to the offsite backup in a timely manner.

Not every code review is fireworks, but most Three Rings changes come from the actual needs of the voluntary organisations that Three Rings supports. Some of our users were confused by the way the Admin > Roles page was laid out, so one of our volunteers wrote an improved version.

And because we're all about collaboration, discussion, learning from one another, and volunteer-empowerment... I've added a minor suggestion... but approved their change "with or without" it. I trust my fellow volunteer to either accept my suggestion (if it's right), reject it (if it's wrong), or solicit more reviews or bring it to Slack or our fortnightly dev meeting (if it requires discussion).

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GitHub screenshot showing a suggested change to a pull request. Dan-Q is suggesting that the new sentence 'These roles belong to .' should not have a full stop at the end, for consistency with other similar headings.

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 a fellow volunteer on Slack. Three Rings volunteers primarily communicate via Slack: it helps us to work asynchronously, which supports the fact that our volunteers all have different schedules and preferences. Some might do a couple of evenings a week, others might do the odd weekend, others still might do an occasional intense solid week of volunteering with us and then nothing for months! A communication model that works both synchronously and asynchronously is really important to make that volunteering model work, and Slack fits the bill.

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Slack screenshot showing a discussion between Dan Q and another volunteer about whether it's reasonable for a volunteer to be able to send another volunteer an email containing private information accessible only to the second volunteer, so long as it's embedded via a merge field and the actual value is never shown to the first volunteer. Ultimately, Dan suggests that we stick to the established behaviour, which turns out after testing to be that volunteers can't send such private information to one another.

We get together in person sometimes, and we meet on Zoom from time to time too, but Slack is king of communication at Three Rings

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.

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.