Notes – Dan Q

Redundant

Apparently Automattic are laying off around one in six of their workforce. And I’m one of the unlucky ones.

Anybody remote hiring for a UK-based full-stack web developer (in a world that doesn’t seem to believe that full-stack developers exist anymore) with 25+ years professional experience, specialising in PHP, Ruby, JS, HTML, CSS, devops, and about 50% of CMSes you’ve ever heard of (and probably some you haven’t)… with a flair for security, accessibility, standards-compliance, performance, and DexEx?

CV at: https://danq.me/cv/index.html

Unacceptable language

8-year-old, angry: Give me that fucking thing right now!

Me: [Child’s name]! That’s not an acceptable way to ask for something!

8-year-old, calmer: Sorry. PLEASE can you give me that fucking thing?

To-go pint

Sometimes the kids need to leave your pub dinner before you finish your drink, and you need to take a “to-go” pint.

Note #26217

For a little while I got to lie in the sunshine and read my book in quiet solitude. But before long I found I was sharing it with a small child and his noisy games console.

Still delightful, though, and it feels wonderfully Spring-like out there today.

Istanbul decompression

It wasn’t until I made time for myself to get out into the countryside near my home and take the dog for a walk that I realised how much stress I’d been putting myself under during my team meetup, this week.

Istanbul was enjoyable and fascinating, and I love my team, but I always forget until after the fact how much a few days worth of city crowds can make me feel anxious and trapped.

It’s good to get a mile or two from the nearest other human and decompress!

Geocaching Convex Hull now includes Turkey

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. 🎉

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)

Team Desire in Istanbul

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.

Kebab Menu Accessibility

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

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.

Note #26131

Next stop, Istanbul!*

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

Note #26129

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.

Perfect bath

There are few moments of self-satisfaction so great as accidentally running a bath to both the perfect depth and the ideal temperature, after forgetting you’d started drawing the water at all.

Dog Tired

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

More castles and mazes

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).

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!

Cherry blossom

When I was a child, we had a cherry blossom tree in our garden. In late Spring, as the flowers began to wilt, I’d enjoy shaking it to make flutters of pink confetti rain down around me.

This tree, though, spotted on the school run this morning, is very early in its bloom. It feels like a happy reminder that Spring is beginning.