Step out of your head
and into your senses
and into the world
that’s where life happens
…
This week, my friend Boro shared a poem that he’d written. It’s simple, and energising, and insightful, and I really enjoyed it. Go read
the whole thing; it’s not long.
Whether we’re riding high or low, there’s wisdom in being gentle with oneself. The rhythm of the piece feels a bit like breathing, to me, and from that is reminiscent of a breathing
exercise I was shown, once, in which the inhalations were accompanied by a focus on self-awareness and the exhalations with one on situational awareness.
Boro’s poem makes me wonder if he’s come across the same exercise: that through my appreciation of his post I’m sharing in his experience of the same exercise, in another time and
place.
Sometimes all you need to complete the perfect offset geocache is a GPSr, some hand tools… and the willingness to unilaterally declare a remote bench to be a memorial to a fictional
person, just to get a particular set of numbers out into the world!
Pretty sure there isn’t a prize for Throwing Wet Sponges At Children during the graduating year’s “fun run” at the school sports day… but just like the kids are asked to, I’m going to
try my best. 😁
I’ve been in a lot of interviews over the last two or three weeks. But there’s a moment that stands out and that I’ll remember forever as the most-smug I’ve ever felt during an
interview.
There’ll soon be news to share about what I’m going to be doing with the second half of this year…
This particular interview included a mixture of technical and non-technical questions, but a particular technical question stood out for reasons that will rapidly become apparent. It
went kind-of like this:
Interviewer: How would you go about designing a backend cache that retains in memory some number of most-recently-accessed items?
Dan: It sounds like you’re talking about an LRU cache. Coincidentally, I implemented exactly that just the other
week, for fun, in two of this role’s preferred programming languages (and four other languages). I wrote a blog post about my design
choices: specifically, why I opted for a hashmap for quick reads and a doubly-linked-list for constant-time writes. I’m sending you the links to it now: may I talk you through the
diagrams?
Interviewer:
That’s probably the most-overconfident thing I’ve said at an interview since before I started at the Bodleian, 13 years ago. In the interview for
that position I spent some time explaining that for the role they were recruiting for they were asking the wrong questions! I provided some better questions that I felt they
should ask to maximise their chance of getting the best candidate… and then answered them, effectively helping to write my own interview.
Anyway: even ignoring my cockiness, my interview the other week was informative and enjoyable throughout, and I’m pleased that I’ll soon be working alongside some of the people that I
met: they seem smart, and driven, and focussed, and it looks like the kind of environment in which I could do well.
Deciphered this puzzle when it was first published: so long ago that I’d forgotten the specifics of how exactly I did so (although I’m pretty confident I remember the gist of it). But I
don’t find myself over this side of Oxford often, these days, and so it took until today that an errand brought me over here before I had a chance to actually try and log it.
Near the GZ I found an obvious trail around the nearby structure and undertook a thorough search of all the obvious hiding places before widening my explorations to the surrounding
foliage. Eventually, after about 20 minutes of hunting, I had to give up for shortage of time.
With almost a year since a successful log here and evidence that this trail is now routinely used by a nearby group of non-geocachers, it’s very possible that the cache has been
disturbed. I’ll be waiting until a CO checkin (or successful log) before I try again.
In Marston on an errand, I found myself with enough free time to try to find another few local caches. This puzzle wasn’t as easy as Dotty’s other one, fir me, because for a while I was
counting the wrong things, but I cracked it in the end. A slow walk past the GZ with my fingers in the obvious space soon put the cache in my hand. Log extraction required stone
creative use of a naturally occurring tool, but before long it was signed and returned. TFTC!
When I posted to LinkedIn about my recent redundancy, I saw
a tidal wave of reposts and well-wishes. But there’s one that I’ve come back to whenever I need a pick-me-up before I, y’know, trawl the job boards: a comment-repost by my big-hearted,
sharp-minded former co-worker Kyle. I’m posting it here because I want to keep a copy forever1:
Bad news: I’m among the sixth of Automattic that’s been laid-off this week.
Good news: I’m #OpenToWork, and excited about the opportunity to bring my unique skillset to a new role. Could I be the Senior Software Engineer, Full-Stack Web Developer, or
Technical Lead that you’re looking for?
Here’s what makes me special:
🕸️ 26+ years experience of backend and frontend development, with a focus on standards, accessibility, performance, security, and the open Web
🌎 20+ years experience of working in and leading remote/distributed teams in a diversity of sectors
👨💻 Professional experience of many of the technologies you’ve heard of (PHP, Ruby, Java, Perl, SQL, Go, DevOps, JS, jamstacks, headless…), and probably some you haven’t…
👨🎓 Degrees and other qualifications spanning computer science and software engineering, psychotherapy, ethical hacking, and digital forensics (I don’t believe there’s a career in
the world that makes use of all of these, but if you know differently, tell me!)
If this man isn’t hired immediately, it’s a huge loss. Dan is easily one of the most talented engineers I’ve ever met. His skills are endless, his personal culture is delightful,
and I don’t think I went a day working with him where I didn’t learn something. Let him build you beautiful things. I dare you.
Incidentally, Kyle’s looking for a new role too. If you’re in need of a WordPress/PHP/React pro with a focus on delivering the MVP fast and keeping the customer’s needs
front-and-centre, you should look him up. He’s based in Cape Town but he’s a remote/distributed veteran that you could slot into
your Web team anywhere.
Footnotes
1 My blog was already 5 years old when LinkedIn was founded: my general thinking is that I
can’t trust any free service younger than my blog to retain information for perpetuity longer than my blog, which is why so much of my content from around the web gets
PESOS‘d or POSSE‘d here.
As time has gone by, a great many rural English villages have been consumed by their nearest towns, or else become little more than dormitory villages: a place where people do little
more than eat and sleep in-between their commutes to-and-from their distant workplaces1.
And so it pleases me at least a little that the tiny village I’ve lived in for five years this week still shows great success in how well
it clings on to its individual identity.
Right now our village green is surrounded by flags, bunting, and thematic decorations.
Every summer since time immemorial, for example, it’s hosted a Village Festival, and this year it feels like the community’s gone all-out. The theme this year is A Century in
Television, and most of the festivities seem to tie-in to the theme.
If you recognise these characters from their first time around on British television, you’re probably older than I am. If you recognise them from their 2001 “reboot”, then you’re probably younger.
I’ve been particularly impressed this year by entrants into the (themed) scarecrow competition: some cracking scarecrows (and related decorations) have started popping up around the
village in advance of festival week!
Bob the Builder’s helping out with the reconstruction of the roof of one of the houses down towards the end of my hamlet, just outside the village proper.
There’s a clear bias towards characters from childrens’ television programmes, but that only adds to the charm. Not only does it amuse the kids when we walk by them, but it feeds into
the feeling of nostalgia that the festival theme seems to evoke (as well, perhaps, as a connection to the importance of this strange village tradition).
Well-played, Letterbox Cottage. Well-played.
If you took a wrong turning and found your way through our village when you meant to be somewhere else, you’d certainly be amused, bemused, or both by the plethora of figures standing
on street corners, atop hedgerows, and just generally around the place2.
Shaun the Sheep and what I believe must be his cousin Timmy stand atop a hedge looking down on a route used by many children on their way to school.
The festival, like other events in the local calendar, represents a collective effort by the “institutions” of the village – the parish council, the church, the primary school, etc.
But the level of time and emotional investment from individual households (whether they’re making scarecrows for the Summer festival… decorating windows as a Christmas advent calendar…
turning out for a dog show last week, I hear3…)
shows the heart of a collective that really engage with this kind of community. Which is really sweet.
An imaginative use of a coloured lampshade plus some excellent tinfoil work makes Zebedee here come to life. He could only have been more-thematic if he’d been installed on the
village’s (only) roundabout!
Anyway, the short of it is that I feel privileged to live in a village that punches above its weight class when it comes to retaining its distinctive personality. And seeing so many of
my neighbours, near and far, putting these strange scarecrows out, reminded me of that fact.
I’m sure I’m barely scraping the surface – there are definitely a few I know of that I’ve not managed to photograph yet – but there are a lot of scarecrows
around my way, right now.
Footnotes
1 The “village” in which our old house
resided certainly had the characteristic feel of “this used to be a place of its own, but now it’s only-barely not just a residential estate on the outskirts of Oxford, for example.
Kidlington had other features, of course, like Oxford’s short-lived zoological gardens… but it didn’t really feel like it had an identity in
its own right.
2 Depending on exactly which wrong turn you took, the first scarecrow you saw might well
be the one dressed as a police officer – from some nonspecific police procedural drama, one guesses? – that’s stood guard shortly after the first of the signs to advertise our new 20mph speed limit. Holding what I guess is supposed to be a radar gun (but is clearly actually a mini handheld
vacuum cleaner), this scarecrow might well be having a meaningful effect on reducing speeding through our village, and for that alone it might be my favourite.
3 I didn’t enter our silly little furball into the
village dog show, for a variety of reasons: mostly because I had other things to do at the time, but also because she’s a truculent little troublemaker who – especially in the heat of
a Summer’s day – would probably just try to boss-around the other dogs.
Note to future self: when you want git to tell you all the files you’ve modified, but not those you’ve deleted (e.g. to pipe through xargs and feed to your linter for bulk-linting), the
command you’re looking for is –
Third time’s the charm. I don’t live too far away and I’m often found cycling to, from, or through Eynsham. As a result, I’ve on two previous occasions come to this GZ with a view to
finding this cache… and both times have been glorious summer weekend days when the adjacent café has been brim full of guests, and I’ve declared it “too muggley” and backed off.
Today, though, is a gloomy and overcast day, with rain on the way and a threat of thunderstorms. So as I cycled by, on my way home from the dentist, I stopped by. I quickly found and
retrieved the cache, signed the log, and returned it to its spot.
Now I’d better see if I can pedal all the way home before the clouds burst! TFTC.
Stopped by while cycling back from Witney. Made a moderately thorough search above and below the titular bridge, without success. Might benefit from a checkin/note from the CO.
Maybe I’m just not seeing it, or else maybe it’s vanished in the six months since its last successful find. Great place for a cache, though!
