Author: Dan Q
Dan Q is a software engineer, a director of a voluntary organisation, a trainee counsellor, a keen geocacher, and an amateur magician. He lives with his partner and her husband in a polyamorous triad, and occasionally finds time to blog.
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Reply to: I Wish I Could Talk to My Dad
Inspired by a mate whose dad recently died, Kev Quirk shared his own experience of his father's death, and a particular ritual of his reminded me of one of my own.
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There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻
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Two lines of holes cover a portion of a light green wall, with a rectangular gap between them, under a protruding screw, where perhaps a tray shelf was once mounted.
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What breaks when one of your developers leaves?
On Friday, I said goodbye to a colleague as she left us after most of a decade with the company. Then this morning, all hell broke loose on some production servers.
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DataDog graph marked to show a co-worker's departure on Friday evening being immediately followed by a flurry of errors which then stopped for the weekend before coming back in force on Monday morning.
It turns out that the API key that connected our application to our feature flag management platform was associated with her account, and hadn't shown up in the exit audit.
Let this be your reminder to go check where, if anywhere, your applications are using person-specific keys where they should be using generic ones!
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Found GCBN167 Ivy Believe It's Up There!
This afternoon I'm acting as backup driver for my partner Ruth, who's walking the length of the Thames Path by (very gradual) instalments. A delightful tree climb soon gave me this great cache container!
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Did not find GC3KQK2 RRR10
A little sad to DNF this cache which is probably just well-hidden, but I've only got limited time to hunt as I'm the backup driver for this segment of a walk down the entire length of the Thames Path.
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Finding the right Bottom Hole paper
Terence Eden takes us on a rabbithole of trying to work out what actual newspaper formed the basis of the newspaper prop in an episode of Bottom, and it makes an amusing ride-along.
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I took the dog out for a walk from the Chicory House yesterday. At one point, we found ourselves on a familiar-looking footpath: I couldn't place exactly why I'd been there before. Geocaching, possibly: I couldn't see any on the map but perhaps they'd been since archived?
Fortunately, I maintain a personal tracklog of virtually everywhere I've been in the last decade or two, so I was able to run a quick query and discover that I'd walked out here on a geohashing expedition in 2024.
Personal location tracking continues to be awesome. Being able to both forwards-search ("where was I on this date?") and reverse-search ("when was I last within this area?") unlocks a wealth of aides mémoire that are otherwise hard to come by.
It's hard to sell people on the idea, probably because it's a slow-burner - you need lots of data before it starts to pay off! - but I still recommend it.
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FlipFlop Solitaire's Deck-Generation Secret
I enjoy a mobile game called FlipFlop Solitaire, which provides a few thousand pre-seeded decks that are guaranteed "winnable". This blew my mind for a little while - how can you be sure that these shuffles are all winnable? But then I worked out a way to achieve exactly that result... by thinking in reverse!
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Today, for the first time ever, I reached the end of a roll if dental floss without first losing or giving up on it.
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As if I hadn't suffered enough "flood damage" this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup - hour the first time in months! - in our rental... by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱
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A desktop computer keyboard inverted over a kitchen sink, with many of its keycaps scattered around.
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Chicory, Coffee, and Code
Now that we've finished our move into the Chicory House, I have for the first time in over two months been able to set up my preferred coding environment... with a proper monitor on a proper desk with a proper office chair. Bliss!
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My Salary History
Inspired by Jeremy Keith doing the same, I've made the salary history of my career transparent.
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Good morning, Goldfinch
A goldfinch came to my bedroom window to say hi, this morning. Good morning, Goldfinch!
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Chicory Keys
There's a special spot in my wallet where my "front door key" lives, but - despite the practical reasons to do so - I've resisted adding the Chicory House key in that spot. Instead, I've found myself keeping it in the "secondary key" spot, as a tiny reminder that the current state of affairs is a temporary one.
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Unpacked Kitchen
Today's mission in what we're calling the Chicory House - our home while our actual house gets repaired - was to unpack the kitchen. I think it's looking pretty good!
(The cardboard box you can see contains pans we brought with us that turn out to be incompatible with the induction hobs at the Chicory House, boo!)
Next weekend's mission will be to set myself up a workspace that isn't the conservatory dining table. 😬