Category: Personal

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.

TFW a recipe calls for a glass of wine but you can't get the cork back in the bottle so you just have to drink the rest of it.

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Dan, in a kitchen with some kind of tomato sauce on a hob behind him, holds a glass of red wine and shrugs at the camera.

Ah well, what's a chef to do? 🤷🍷

Not quite ready for wintering indoors, our village's hardy sheep are enjoying pasturing in the large field near the school this beautiful but chilly morning.

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Warm colours break through scattered clouds from a winter sunrise over sheep grazing in a scrubby pasture.

In good news, my injured arm is not broken and should recover within a couple of weeks.

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Dan, wearing a sling, stands near the reception of a Minor Injuries Unit.

In amusing news, the doctor who treated me recognised me from (tales of) my electric shock admission earlier in the year, even though she never treated me on that ocassion.

I'm leaving Ireland a day late, from the wrong airport, and with one fewer functioning arm than I anticipated. It's been quite the ride. I'll be glad to get home.

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Dan sits in an airport bar drinking a beer held in his right hand. His left arm is in a sling.

(for those that are concerned: I've damaged my shoulder, possibly while slipping down a hill in search of a geocache or geohashpoint; so, y'know, the usual reason I get injured... but I've got some physio instructions I'm supposed to follow, and I'll be okay)

Sooo... I'm in Dublin.

I missed me flight at Knock airport, which turns out to have been the only plane leaving that tiny airport today. So I arranged a flight from Dublin tomorrow, extended my car rental and arranged to drop it off in the capital's airport instead, and zipped over here.

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Two pints of Guinness on a candlelit table.

Now I'm in an underlit bar sipping a Guinness and waiting for a pizza.