Year: 2025

Thanks to finding a couple of geocaches here in Istanbul, my geocaching "2D convex hull" (the smallest possible convex polygon that covers an area), which I wrote some code to draw last year, just expanded a little further to the East. 🎉

Alt

World map, with an irregular near-quadrilatral drawn such that it approximately connects Inverness (Scotland), Istanbul (Turkey), Cape Town (South Africa), and San Francisco (California, USA), encompassing the area within.

I've got a lot of the world left still to encircle, but I'm slowly extending my reach...

(previous map, for comparison: https://danq.me/_q23u/2024/04/dans-geoing-hull-2024-04-03.webp)

With visa complications and travel challenges, this is the very first time that my team - whom I've been working with for the last year - have ever all been in the same country, all at the same time.

You can do a lot in a distributed work environment. But sometimes you just have to come together... in celebration of your achievements, in anticipation of what you'll do next, and in aid of doing those kinds of work that really benefit from a close, communal, same-timezone environment.

Alt

A group of men sit on chairs, a sofa, and the edge of a desk in a comfortable large office space.

Hanging with my team at our meetup in Istanbul, this lunchtime I needed to do some accessibility testing...

(with apologies to anybody who doesn't know that in user interface design, a "kebab menu" is one of those menu icons with a vertical line of three dots: a vertical ellipsis)

Istanbul is... sprawling. I stood on this footbridge, over the water, to try to comprehend the scale of the place, but it's just massive. The hills, which help the tall buildings to tower over you no matter where you stand, only serve to exaggerate the effect. Quite the spectacle of human settlement.

Alt

View from above a river, flanked by dense city on both sides, under an overcast sky.

Next stop, Istanbul!*

* not actually next stop; I've got a bus, a walk, a bus, and a plane left on this journey yet!

Alt

Dan, a white man with a trimmed goatee beard and dyed-blue hair tied back in a ponytail, stands alongside a suburban bus shelter and throws a thumbs-up sign. He's carrying a backpack.

Good morning, Oxfordshire! A freezing-fog farewell for me, this morning, as I get up early to catch a series of buses to the airport.

Alt

A wet rural road, lit by the sun's first light as it rises ahead, it's flanked by fields full of freezing fog.

Woke up. Had a walk. Now it must be time for a well-earned nap. 💤

Alt

A sleepy-looking French Bulldog, wearing a harness, lying on her side in a dog basket with her eyes mostly-closed and her tongue mostly-in-her-mouth.

Made a little progress on the game idea I'd been experimenting with. The idea is to do find a series of orthogonal (like a rook in chess!) moves that land on every square exactly once each before returning to the start, dodging walls and jumping pits.

But the squares have arrows (limiting the direction you can move out of them) or numbers (specifying the distance you must travel from them).

Alt

Four sample puzzles, one of them solved.

Every board is solvable, starting from any square. There'll be a playable version to use on your device (with helpful features like "undo") sometime soon, but for now you can give them a go by hand, if you like this kind of puzzle!