Kind: Notes

The phone signal is so shit at this year's 3Camp venue that I've had to climb a hill to take a call from a lawyer (whom I'm speaking to about my recent redundancy). Nice to be outdoors, though!

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Dan, with a laptop, sitting alongside a rural Lake District lane in bright sunshine.

I'm off for a week of full-time volunteering with Three Rings at 3Camp, our annual volunteer hack week: bringing together our distributed team for some intensive in-person time, working to make life better for charities around the world.

And if there's one good thing to come out of me being suddenly and unexpectedly laid-off two days ago, it's that I've got a shiny new laptop to do my voluntary work on (Automattic have said that I can keep it).

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Black Macbook Pro whose screen shows a locally-hosted copy of the Three Rings web application, overlaid with a terminal running lazygit.

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

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Dan, grinning, holding a quarter pint of beer in few rear passenger seat of a moving car.

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.

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Dan, seen from his 'head' end, lies in a hammock with a green book, 'Bored Gay Werewolf' on his belly. At the other end of the hammock a boy plays on a Nintendo Switch. Around them is a garden containing a climbing frame and a washing line full of white shirts and sheets.

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!

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Dan, a red leash hung across his shoulders, gives a half-shrug as he smiles for a selfie on a grassy trail between a hedgerow and a field. Behind him, near a weathered old-fashioned footpath sign, his French Bulldog looks at him expectantly.

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. 🎉

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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