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The Beer Token

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1979

The novelisation of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came out in 1979, just a smidge before I was born. There’s a well-known scene in the second chapter featuring Ford Prefect, an alien living on Earth, distracting his human friend Arthur Dent. Arthur is concerned about the imminent demolition of his house by a wrecking crew, and Ford takes him to the pub to get him drunk, in anticipation of the pair attempting to hitch a lift on an orbiting spacecraft that’s about to destroy the planet:

“Six pints of bitter,” said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. “And quickly please, the world’s about to end.”

The barman of the Horse and Groom didn’t deserve this sort of treatment, he was a dignified old man. He pushed his glasses up his nose and blinked at Ford Prefect. Ford ignored him and stared out of the window, so the barman looked instead at Arthur who shrugged helplessly and said nothing.

So the barman said, “Oh yes sir? Nice weather for it,” and started pulling pints.

He tried again.

“Going to watch the match this afternoon then?”

Ford glanced round at him.

“No, no point,” he said, and looked back out of the window.

“What’s that, foregone conclusion then you reckon sir?” said the barman. “Arsenal without a chance?”

“No, no,” said Ford, “it’s just that the world’s about to end.”

“Oh yes sir, so you said,” said the barman, looking over his glasses this time at Arthur. “Lucky escape for Arsenal if it did.”

Ford looked back at him, genuinely surprised.

“No, not really,” he said. He frowned.

The barman breathed in heavily. “There you are sir, six pints,” he said.

Arthur smiled at him wanly and shrugged again. He turned and smiled wanly at the rest of the pub just in case any of them had heard what was going on.

None of them had, and none of them could understand what he was smiling at them for.

A man sitting next to Ford at the bar looked at the two men, looked at the six pints, did a swift burst of mental arithmetic, arrived at an answer he liked and grinned a stupid hopeful grin at them.

“Get off,” said Ford, “They’re ours,” giving him a look that would have an Algolian Suntiger get on with what it was doing.

Ford slapped a five-pound note on the bar. He said, “Keep the change.”

“What, from a fiver? Thank you sir.”

There’s a few great jokes there, but I’m interested in the final line. Ford buys six pints of bitter, pays with a five-pound note, and says “keep the change”, which surprises the barman. Presumably this is as a result of Ford’s perceived generosity… though of course what’s really happening is that Ford has no use for Earth money any longer; this point is hammered home for the barman and nearby patrons when Ford later buys four packets of peanuts, also asking the barman to keep the change from a fiver.

A pint of light-coloured beer on wooden board, with the sea in the background. An orange towel sits alongside. — Beer’s important, but you also need to know where your towel is.

We’re never told exactly what the barman would have charged Ford. But looking at the history of average UK beer prices and assuming that the story is set in 1979, we can assume that the pints will have been around 34p each¹, so around £2.04 for six of them. So… Ford left a 194% tip for the beer².

1990

By the time I first read Hitch-Hikers, around 1990, this joke was already dated. By then, an average pint of bitter would set you back £1.10. I didn’t have a good awareness of that, being as I was well-underage to be buying myself alcohol! But I clearly had enough of an awareness that my dad took the time to explain the joke… that is, to point out that when the story was written (and is presumably set), six pints would cost less than half of five pounds.

But by the mid-nineties, when I’d found a friend group who were also familiar with the Hitch-Hikers… series, we’d joke about it. Like pointing out that by then if you told the barman to keep the change from £5 after buying six pints, the reason he’d express surprise wouldn’t be because you’d overpaid…

Stock photo of a barman serving two patrons, annotated with speech bubbles. One patron says "Keep the change." The barman, smiling, says "What, from a a fiver. Fuck you sir." — In his defence, Ford’s an alien and might not fully understand human concepts of inflation. Or sarcasm.

1998

Precocious drinker that I was, by the late nineties I was quite aware of the (financial) cost of drinking.

Dan, then with long black hair, sits with another young white man in a garden, in front of a table laden with several bottles of wine and around 80 cans of beer. — Sure, this seems like a responsible amount of alcohol for a party thrown by a couple of tearaway teenagers. Definitely nothing going to go wrong here, no siree.

And so when it was announced that a new denomination of coin – the £2 coin – would enter general circulation³ I was pleased to announce how sporting it was of the government to release a “beer token”.

With the average pint of beer at the time costing around £1.90 and a still cash-dominated economy, the “beer token” was perfect! And in my case, it lasted: the bars I was drinking at in the late 1990s were in the impoverished North, and were soon replaced with studenty bars on the West coast of Wales, both of which allowed the price of a pint to do battle with inflationary forces for longer than might have been expected elsewhere in the country. The “beer token” that was the £2 coin was a joke that kept on giving for some time.

Close-up of a 1998 £2 coin; bimetallic, with an inner ring of cogs expanding outwards into several interlocking spirals. — The one thing I always hated about the initial design for the bimetallic £2 coin was – and this is the nerdiest thing in the world with which to take issue – the fact that it had a ring of **19 cogs** to represent British industry. But if you connect a circuit of an odd number of cogs… it won’t function. Great metaphor, there. Photo courtesy of the late Andy Fogg, used under a Creative Commons license.

2023

As the cost of living rapidly increased circa 2023, the average price of a pint of beer in the UK finally got to the point where, rounded to the nearest whole pound, it was closer to £5 than it is to £4⁴.

And while we could moan and complain about how much things cost nowadays, I’d prefer to see this as an opportunity. An opportunity for a new beer token: a general-release of the £5 coin. We already some defined characteristics that fit: a large, heavy coin, about twice the weight of the £2 coin, with a copper/nickel lustre and struck from engravings with thick, clear lines.

And the design basically comes up with itself. I give you… the Beer Token of the 2020s:

It’s time for the beer token to return, in the form of the £5 coin. Now is the time… now is the last time, probably… before cash becomes such a rarity that little thought is evermore given to the intersection of its design and utility. And compared to a coin that celebrates industry while simultaneously representing a disfunctional machine, this is a coin that Brits could actually be proud of. It’s a coin that tourists would love to take home with them, creating a satisfying new level of demand for the sinking British Pound that might, just might, prop up the economy a little, just as here at home they support those who prop up the bar.

I know there must be a politician out there who’s ready to stand up and call for this new coin. My only fear is that it’s Nigel Fucking Farage… at which point I’d be morally compelled to reject my own proposal.

But for now, I think I’ll have another drink.

Footnotes

¹ The recession of the 1970s brought high inflation that caused the price of beer to rocket, pretty much tripling in price over the course of the decade. Probably Douglas Adams didn’t anticipate that it’d more-than-double again over the course of the 1980s before finally slowing down somewhat… at least until tax changes in 2003 and the aftermath of the 2022 inflation rate spike!

² We do know that the four packets of peanuts Ford bought later were priced at 7p each, so his tip on that transaction was a massive 1,686%: little wonder the barman suddenly started taking more-seriously Ford’s claims about the imminent end of the world!

³ There were commemorative £2 coins of a monometallic design floating around already, of course, but – being collectible – these weren’t usually found in circulation, so I’m ignoring them.

⁴ Otherwise known as “two beer tokens”, of course. As in “Bloody hell, 2022, why does a pint of draught cost two beer tokens now?”

Internet Services^H Provider

Do you remember when your domestic ISP – Internet Service Provider – used to be an Internet Services Provider? They were only sometimes actually called that, but what I mean is: when ISPs provided more than one Internet service? Not just connectivity, but… more.

ISPs twenty years ago

It used to just be expected that your ISP would provide you with not only an Internet connection, but also some or all of:

A handful of email inboxes, plus SMTP relaying
Shared or private FTP storage¹
Hosting for small Websites/homepages
Usenet access
Email-to-fax and/or fax-to-email services
Caching forward proxies (this was so-commonplace that it isn’t even listed in the “standard services” screenshot above)
One or more local nodes to IRC networks
Sometimes, licenses for useful Internet software
For leased-line (technically “broadband”, by the original definition) connections: a static IP address or IP pool

ISPs today

The ISP I hinted at above doesn’t exist any more, after being bought out and bought out and bought out by a series of owners. But I checked the Website of the current owner to see what their “standard services” are, and discovered that they are:

A pretty-shit router²
Optional 4G backup connectivity (for an extra fee)
A voucher for 3 months access to a streaming service³

The connection is faster, which is something, but we’re still talking about the “baseline” for home Internet access then-versus-now. Which feels a bit galling, considering that (a) you’re clearly, objectively, getting fewer services, and (b) you’re paying more for them – a cheap basic home Internet subscription today, after accounting for inflation, seems to cost about 25% more than it did in 2000.⁴

Are we getting a bum deal?

An xternal 33.6kbps serial port dial-up modem. — Not every BBS nor ISP would ever come to support the blazing speeds of a 33.6kbps modem… but when you heard the distinctive scream of its negotiation at close to the Shannon Limit of the piece of copper dangling outside your house… it felt like you were living in the future.

Would you even want those services?

Some of them were great conveniences at the time, but perhaps not-so-much now: a caching server, FTP site, or IRC node in the building right at the end of my dial-up connection? That’s a speed boost that was welcome over a slow connection to an unencrypted service, but is redundant and ineffectual today. And if you’re still using a fax-to-email service for any purpose, then I think you have bigger problems than your ISP’s feature list!

Some of them were things I wouldn’t have recommend that you depend on, even then: tying your email and Web hosting to your connectivity provider traded one set of problems for another. A particular joy of an email address, as opposed to a postal address (or, back in the day, a phone number), is that it isn’t tied to where you live. You can move to a different town or even to a different country and still have the same email address, and that’s a great thing! But it’s not something you can guarantee if your email address is tied to the company you dial-up to from the family computer at home. A similar issue applies to Web hosting, although for a true traditional “personal home page”: a little information about yourself, and your bookmarks, it would be fine.

But some of them were things that were actually useful and I miss: honestly, it’s a pain to have to use a third-party service for newsgroup access, which used to be so-commonplace that you’d turn your nose up at an ISP that didn’t offer it as standard. A static IP being non-standard on fixed connections is a sad reminder that the ‘net continues to become less-participatory, more-centralised, and just generally more watered-down and shit: instead of your connection making you “part of” the Internet, nowadays it lets you “connect to” the Internet, which is a very different experience.⁵

But the Web hosting, for example, wasn’t useless. In fact, it served an important purpose in lowering the barrier to entry for people to publish their first homepage! The magical experience of being able to just FTP some files into a directory and have them be on the Web, as just a standard part of the “package” you bought-into, was a gateway to a participatory Web that’s nowadays sadly lacking.

Yeah, sure, you can set up a static site (unencumbered by any opinionated stack) for free on Github Pages, Neocities, or wherever, but the barrier to entry has been raised by just enough that, doubtless, there are literally millions of people who would have taken that first step… but didn’t.

And that makes me sad.

Footnotes

¹ ISP-provided shared FTP servers would also frequently provide locally-available copies of Internet software essentials for a variety of platforms. This wasn’t just a time-saver – downloading Netscape Navigator from your ISP rather than from half-way across the world was much faster! – it was also a way to discover new software, curated by people like you: a smidgen of the feel of a well-managed BBS, from the comfort of your local ISP!

² ISP-provided routers are, in my experience, pretty crap 50% of the time… although they’ve been improving over the last decade as consumers have started demanding that their WiFi works well, rather than just works.

³ These streaming services vouchers are probably just a loss-leader for the streaming service, who know that you’ll likely renew at full price afterwards.

⁴ Okay, in 2000 you’d have also have had to pay per-minute for the price of the dial-up call… but that money went to BT (or perhaps Mercury or KCOM), not to your ISP. But my point still stands: in a world where technology has in general gotten cheaper and backhaul capacity has become underutilised, why has the basic domestic Internet connection gotten less feature-rich and more-expensive? And often with worse customer service, to boot.

⁵ The problem of your connection not making you “part of” the Internet is multiplied if you suffer behind carrier-grade NAT, of course. But it feels like if we actually cared enough to commit to rolling out IPv6 everywhere we could obviate the need for that particular turd entirely. And yet… I’ll bet that the ISPs who currently use it will continue to do so, even as the offer IPv6 addresses as-standard, because they buy into their own idea that it’s what their customers want.

⁶ I think we can all be glad that we no longer write “Web Site” as two separate words, but you’ll note that I still usually correctly capitalise Web (it’s a proper noun: it’s the Web, innit!).

Part of the Internet, or connecting to the Internet?

Some time in the last 25 years, ISPs stopped saying they made you “part of” the Internet, just that they’d help you “connect to” the Internet.

Most people don’t need a static IP, sure. But when ISPs stopped offering FTP and WWW hosting as a standard feature (shit though it often was), they became part of the tragic process by which the Internet became centralised, and commoditised, and corporate, and just generally watered-down.

The amount of effort to “put something online” didn’t increase by a lot, but it increased by enough that millions probably missed-out on the opportunity to create their first homepage.

Lock All The Computers

I wanted a way to simultaneously lock all of the computers – a mixture of Linux, MacOS and Windows boxen – on my desk, when I’m going to step away. Here’s what I came up with:

There’s optional audio in this video, if you want it.

One button. And everything locks. Nice!

Here’s how it works:

The mini keyboard is just 10 cheap mechanical keys wired up to a CH552 chip. It’s configured to send CTRL+ALT+F13 through CTRL+ALT+F22¹ when one of its keys are pressed.
The “lock” key is captured by my KVM tool Deskflow (which I migrated to when Barrier became neglected, which in turn I migrated to when I fell out of love with Synergy). It then relays this hotkey across to all currently-connected machines².
That shortcut is captured by each recipient machine in different ways:
- The Linux computers run LXDE, so I added a line to /etc/xdg/openbox/rc.xml to set a <keybind> that executes xscreensaver-command -lock.
- For the Macs, I created a Quick Action in Automator that runs pmset displaysleepnow as a shell script³, and then connected that via Keyboard Shortcuts > Services.
- On the Windows box, I’ve got AutoHotKey running anyway, so I just have it run { DllCall("LockWorkStation") } when it hears the keypress.

That’s all there is to is! A magic “lock all my computers, I’m stepping away” button, that’s much faster and more-convenient than locking two to five computers individually.

Footnotes

¹ F13 through F24 are absolutely valid “standard” key assignments, of course: it’s just that the vast majority of keyboards don’t have keys for them! This makes them excellent candidates for non-clashing personal-use function keys, but I like to append one or more modifier keys to the as well to be absolutely certain that I don’t interact with things I didn’t intend to!

² Some of the other buttons on my mini keyboard are mapped to “jumping” my cursor to particular computers (if I lose it, which happens more often than I’d like to admit), and “locking” my cursor to the system it’s on.

³ These boxes are configured to lock as soon as the screen blanks; if yours don’t then you might need a more-sophisticated script.

The Huge Grey Area in the Anthropic Ruling

This week, AI firm Anthropic (the folks behind Claude) found themselves the focus of attention of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

New laws for new technologies

The tl;dr is: the court ruled that (a) piracy for the purpose of training an LLM is still piracy, so there’ll be a separate case about the fact that Anthropic did not pay for copies of all the books their model ingested, but (b) training a model on books and then selling access to that model, which can then produce output based on what it has “learned” from those books, is considered transformative work and therefore fair use.

Compelling arguments have been made both ways on this topic already, e.g.:

Some folks are very keen to point out that it’s totally permitted for humans to read, and even memorise, entire volumes, and then use what they’ve learned when they produce new work. They argue that what an LLM “does” is not materially different from an impossibly well-read human.
By way of counterpoint, it’s been observed that such a human would still be personally liable if the “inspired” output they subsequently created was derivative to the point of violating copyright, but we don’t yet have a strong legal model for assessing AI output in the same way. (BBC News article about Disney & Universal vs. Midjourney is going to be very interesting!)
Furthermore, it might be impossible to conclusively determine that the way GenAI works is fundamentally comparable to human thought. And that’s the thing that got me thinking about this particular thought experiment.

A moment of philosophy

Here’s a thought experiment:

Support I trained an LLM on all of the books of just one author (plus enough additional language that it was able to meaningfully communicate). Let’s take Stephen King’s 65 novels and 200+ short stories, for example. We’ll sell access to the API we produce.

The output of this system would be heavily-biased by the limited input it’s been given: anybody familiar with King’s work would quickly spot that the AI’s mannerisms echoed his writing style. Appropriately prompted – or just by chance – such a system would likely produce whole chapters of output that would certainly be considered to be a substantial infringement of the original work, right?

If I make KingLLM, I’m going to get sued, rightly enough.

But if we accept that (and assume that the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California would agree)… then this ruling on Anthropic would carry a curious implication. That if enough content is ingested, the operation of the LLM in itself is no longer copyright infringement.

Which raises the question: where is the line? What size of corpus must a system be trained upon before its processing must necessarily be considered transformative of its inputs?

Clearly, trying to answer that question leads to a variant of the sorites paradox. Nobody can ever say that, for example, an input of twenty million words is enough to make a model transformative but just one fewer and it must be considered to be perpetually ripping off what little knowledge it has!

But as more of these copyright holder vs. AI company cases come to fruition, it’ll be interesting to see where courts fall. What is fair use and what is infringing?

And wherever the answers land, I’m sure there’ll be folks like me coming up with thought experiments that sit uncomfortably in the grey areas that remain.

Bored Gay Werewolf by Tony Santorella

What can I possibly say about Bored Gay Werewolf, which caught my attention with the garish colours of its front cover when I saw it in Waterstones and whose blurb suggested that it might, perhaps, be a queer fantasy romp with a Buffy-esque sense of humour.

Werewolf? Sure, it’s got a few of those. There’s even a bit of fun, offbeat humour each time the protagonist reflects on their curious monthly cycle and tries to work out whether they attacked or even killed anybody this time around. But mostly it’s not a story about werewolf: it’s a story about a slacker who gets suckered into a pyramid scheme, with just a hint of lycanthropy around the fringes.

Gay? I mean: the protagonist’s gay, and many of their friends are queer… and while the representation is good, sexuality doesn’t feel like it’s a particularly significant issue to the storyline. I enjoyed the parallels that were drawn between Brian’s coming-out as gay versus his (for most of the story) closeted werewolf nature – which even though I saw them coming from the first chapter onwards were still well-presented – but apart from that it almost felt like gayness wasn’t a central theme to the story. A smidge of homophobia, some queer culture references, and a throwaway Grindr hookup with a closeted MSM dude do not contribute enough homosexuality to justify “gay” being the largest, pinkest word on a novel’s cover, if you ask me.

Bored? I was, at some points in the book, but I’m not convinced that’s what was intended. The pacing’s a little inconsistent: a long and drawn-out description of an exercise routines overshadows an exploration of the impact of werewolf super-senses, for example. And a long-foreshadowed fight scene finale feels like it’s over in an instant (with a Van Helsing ex Machina twist that felt simultaneously like the brakes being slammed on and a set-up for an inevitable sequel).

I sound pretty negative about it, I’m sure. But it’s not actually bad. It’s just not actually good, either. It’s a passable, middle-of-the-road time-filler with an interesting hook, a few funny set pieces (I laughed out loud a couple of times, for sure), and a set of misfit characters who spend most of the book feeling a little… incomplete? Though it’s possible that latter point’s at-least partially deliberate, as this is without a doubt a “Gen-Z Grows Up” story. Maybe if I were younger and didn’t yet have my shit together the story would appeal better.

I Wrote the Same Code Six Times!

I was updating my CV earlier this week in anticipation of applying for a handful of interesting-looking roles¹ and I was considering quite how many different tech stacks I claim significant experience in, nowadays.

There are languages I’ve been writing in every single week for the last 15+ years, of course, like PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript. And my underlying fundamentals are solid.

But is it really fair for me to be able to claim that I can code in Java, Go, or Python: languages that I’ve not used commercially within the last 5-10 years?

Obviously, I couldn’t just let that question lie². Let’s find out!

The Test

I fished around on Glassdoor for a bit to find a medium-sized single-sitting tech test, and found a couple of different briefs that I mashed together to create this:

In an object-oriented manner, implement an LRU (Least-Recently Used) cache:

The size of the cache is specified at instantiation.

Arbitrary objects can be put into the cache, along with a retrieval key in the form of a string. Using the same string, you can get the objects back.

If a put operation would increase the number of objects in the cache beyond the size limit, the cached object that was least-recently accessed (by either a put or get operation) is removed to make room for it.

putting a duplicate key into the cache should update the associated object (and make this item most-recently accessed).

Both the get and put operations should resolve within constant (O(1)) time.

Add automated tests to support the functionality.

My plan was to implement a solution to this challenge, in as many of the languages mentioned on my CV as possible in a single sitting.

But first, a little Data Structures & Algorithms theory:

The Theory

Simple case with O(n) complexity

The simplest way to implement such a cache might be as follows:

Use a linear data structure like an array or linked list to store cached items.
On get, iterate through the list to try to find the matching item.
- If found: move it to the head of the list, then return it.
On put, first check if it already exists in the list as with get:
- If it already exists, update it and move it to the head of the list.
- Otherwise, insert it as a new item at the head of the list.
  - If this would increase the size of the list beyond the permitted limit, pop and discard the item at the tail of the list.

Illustration of a simple Cache class with a linked list data structure containing three items, referenced from the class by its head item. It has 'get' and 'put' methods. — It’s simple, elegant and totally the kind of thing I’d accept if I were recruiting for a junior or graduate developer. But we can do better.

The problem with this approach is that it fails the requirement that the methods “should resolve within constant (O(1)) time”³.

Of particular concern is the fact that any operation which might need to re-sort the list to put the just-accessed item at the top ⁴. Let’s try another design:

Achieving O(1) time complexity

Here’s another way to implement the cache:

Retain cache items in a doubly-linked list, with a pointer to both the head and tail
Add a hash map (or similar language-specific structure) for fast lookups by cache key
On get, check the hash map to see if the item exists.
- If so, return it and promote it to the head (as described below).
On put, check the hash map to see if the item exists.
- If so, promote it to the head (as described below).
- If not, insert it at the head by:
  - Updating the prev of the current head item and then pointing the head to the new item (which will have the old head item as its next), and
  - Adding it to the hash map.
  - If the number of items in the hash map would exceed the limit, remove the tail item from the hash map, point the tail at the tail item’s prev, and unlink the expired tail item from the new tail item’s next.
To promote an item to the head of the list:
1. Follow the item’s prev and next to find its siblings and link them to one another (removes the item from the list).
2. Point the promoted item’s next to the current head, and the current head‘s prev to the promoted item.
3. Point the head of the list at the promoted item.

Illustration of a more-sophisticated Cache class with a doubly-linked list data structure containing three items, referenced from the class by its head and tail item. It has 'get' and 'put' methods. It also has a separate hash map indexing each cached item by its key. — Looking at a plate of pointer-spaghetti makes me strangely hungry.

It’s important to realise that this alternative implementation isn’t better. It’s just different: the “right” solution depends on the use-case⁵.

The Implementation

That’s enough analysis and design. Time to write some code.

Picking a handful of the more-useful languages on my CV⁶, I opted to implement in:

Ruby (with RSpec for testing and Rubocop for linting)
PHP (with PHPUnit for testing)
TypeScript (running on Node, with Jest for testing)
Java (with JUnit for testing)
Go (which isn’t really an object-oriented language but acts a bit like one, amirite?)
Python (probably my weakest language in this set, but which actually ended up with quite a tidy solution)

Naturally, I open-sourced everything if you’d like to see for yourself. It all works, although if you’re actually in need of such a cache for your project you’ll probably find an alternative that’s at least as good (and more-likely to be maintained!) in a third-party library somewhere!

What did I learn?

This was actually pretty fun! I might continue to expand my repo by doing the same challenge with a few of the other languages I’ve used professionally at some point or another⁷.

And there’s a few takeaways I got from this experience –

Lesson #1: programming more languages can make you better at all of them

As I went along, one language at a time, I ended up realising improvements that I could make to earlier iterations.

For example, when I came to the TypeScript implementation, I decided to use generics so that the developer can specify what kind of objects they want to store in the cache, rather than just a generic Object, and better benefit type-safety. That’s when I remembered that Java supports generics, too, so I went back and used them there as well.

In the same way as speaking multiple (human) languages or studying linguistics can help unlock new ways of thinking about your communication, being able to think in terms of multiple different programming languages helps you spot new opportunities. When in 2020 PHP 8 added nullsafe operators, union types, and named arguments, I remember feeling confident using them from day one because those features were already familiar to me from Ruby⁸, TypeScript⁹, and Python¹⁰, respectively.

Lesson #2: even when I’m rusty, I can rely on my fundamentals

I’ve applied for a handful of jobs now, but if one of them had invited me to a pairing session on a language I’m rusty on (like Java!) I might’ve felt intimidated.

But it turns out I shouldn’t need to be! With my solid fundamentals and a handful of other languages under my belt, I understand when I need to step away from the code editor and hit the API documentation. Turns out, I’m in a good position to demo any of my language skills.

I remember when I was first learning Go, I wanted to make use of a particular language feature that I didn’t know whether it had. But because I’d used that feature in Ruby, I knew what to search for in Go’s documentation to see if it was supported (it wasn’t) and if so, what the syntax was¹¹.

Lesson #3: structural rules are harder to gearshift than syntactic ones

Switching between six different languages while writing the same application was occasionally challenging, but not in the ways I expected.

I’ve had plenty of experience switching programming languages mid-train-of-thought before. Sometimes you just have to flit between the frontend and backend of your application!

But this time around I discovered: changes in structure are apparently harder for my brain than changes in syntax. E.g.:

Switching in and out of Python’s indentation caught me out at least once (might’ve been better if I took the time to install the language’s tools into my text editor first!).
Switching from a language without enforced semicolon line ends (e.g. Ruby, Go) to one with them (e.g. Java, PHP) had me make the compiler sad several times.
This gets even tougher when not writing the language but writing about the language: my first pass at the documentation for the Go version somehow ended up with Ruby/Python-style #-comments instead of Go/Java/TypeScript-style //-comments; whoops!

I’m guessing that the part of my memory that looks after a language’s keywords, how a method header is structured, and which equals sign to use for assignment versus comparison… are stored in a different part of my brain than the bit that keeps track of how a language is laid-out?¹²

Okay, time for a new job

I reckon it’s time I got back into work, so I’m going to have a look around and see if there’s any roles out there that look exciting to me.

If you know anybody who’s looking for a UK-based, remote-first, senior+, full-stack web developer with 25+ years experience and more languages than you can shake a stick at… point them at my CV, would you?

Footnotes

¹ I suspect that when most software engineers look for a new job, they filter to the languages, frameworks, they feel they’re strongest at. I do a little of that, I suppose, but I’m far more-motivated by culture, sector, product and environment than I am by the shape of your stack, and I’m versatile enough that technology specifics can almost come second. So long as you’re not asking me to write VB.NET.

² It’s sort-of a parallel to how I decided to check the other week that my Gutenberg experience was sufficiently strong that I could write standard ReactJS, too.

³ I was pleased to find a tech test that actually called for an understanding of algorithm growth/scaling rates, so I could steal this requirement for my own experiment! I fear that sometimes, in their drive to be pragmatic and representative of “real work”, the value of a comprehension of computer science fundamentals is overlooked by recruiters.

⁴ Even if an algorithm takes the approach of creating a new list with the inserted/modified item at the top, that’s still just a very-specific case of insertion sort when you think about it, right?

⁵ The second design will be slower at writing but faster at reading, and will scale better as the cache gets larger. That sounds great for a read-often/write-rarely cache, but your situation may differ.

⁶ Okay, my language selection was pretty arbitrary. But if I’d have also come up with implementations in Perl, and C#, and Elixir, and whatever else… I’d have been writing code all day!

⁷ So long as I’m willing to be flexible about the “object-oriented” requirement, there are even more options available to me. Probably the language that I last wrote longest ago would be Pascal: I wonder how much of that I remember?

⁸ Ruby’s safe navigation/”lonely” operator did the same thing as PHP’s nullsafe operator since 2015.

⁹ TypeScript got union types back in 2015, and apart from them being more-strictly-enforced they’re basically identical to PHP’s.

¹⁰ Did you know that Python had keyword arguments since its very first public release way back in 1994! How did it take so many other interpreted languages so long to catch up?

¹¹ The feature was the three-way comparison or “spaceship operator”, in case you were wondering.

¹² I wonder if anybody’s ever laid a programmer in an MRI machine while they code? I’d be really interested to see if different bits of the brain light up when coding in functional programming languages than in procedural ones, for example!

Google Shared My Phone Number!

Duration 6:06

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Earlier this month, I received a phone call from a user of Three Rings, the volunteer/rota management software system I founded¹.

We don’t strictly offer telephone-based tech support – our distributed team of volunteers doesn’t keep any particular “core hours” so we can’t say who’s available at any given time – but instead we answer email/Web based queries pretty promptly at any time of the day or week.

But because I’ve called-back enough users over the years, it’s pretty much inevitable that a few probably have my personal mobile number saved. And because I’ve been applying for a couple of interesting-looking new roles, I’m in the habit of answering my phone even if it’s a number I don’t recognise.

Dan sits at his laptop in front of a long conference table where a group of people are looking at a projector screen. — Many of the charities that benefit from *Three Rings* seem to form the impression that we’re all just sat around in an office, like this. But in fact many of my fellow volunteers only ever see me once or twice a year!

After the first three such calls this month, I was really starting to wonder what had changed. Had we accidentally published my phone number, somewhere? So when the fourth tech support call came through, today (which began with a confusing exchange when I didn’t recognise the name of the caller’s charity, and he didn’t get my name right, and I initially figured it must be a wrong number), I had to ask: where did you find this number?

“When I Google ‘Three Rings login’, it’s right there!” he said.

Google Search results page for 'Three Rings CIC', showing a sidebar with information about the company and including... my personal mobile number and a 'Call' button that calls it! — I almost never use Google Search², so there’s no way I’d have noticed this change if I hadn’t been told about it.

He was right. A Google search that surfaced Three Rings CIC’s “Google Business Profile” now featured… my personal mobile number. And a convenient “Call” button that connects you directly to it.

Some years ago, I provided my phone number to Google as part of an identity verification process, but didn’t consent to it being shared publicly. And, indeed, they didn’t share it publicly, until – seemingly at random – they started doing so, presumably within the last few weeks.

Concerned by this change, I logged into Google Business Profile to see if I could edit it back.

Apparently Google inserted my personal mobile number into search results for me, randomly, without me asking them to. Delightful.

I deleted my phone number from the business listing again, and within a few minutes it seemed to have stopped being served to random strangers on the Internet. Unfortunately deleting the phone number also made the “Your phone number was updated by Google” message disappear, so I never got to click the “Learn more” link to maybe get a clue as to how and why this change happened.

Last month, high-street bank Halifax posted the details of a credit agreement I have with them to two people who aren’t me. Twice in two months seems suspicious. Did I accidentally click the wrong button on a popup and now I’ve consented to all my PII getting leaked everywhere?

Such feelings of rage.

Footnotes

¹ Way back in 2002! We’re very nearly at the point where the Three Rings system is older than the youngest member of the Three Rings team. Speaking of which, we’re seeking volunteers to help expand our support team: if you’ve got experience of using Three Rings and an hour or two a week to spare helping to make volunteering easier for hundreds of thousands of people around the world, you should look us up!

² Seriously: if you’re still using Google Search as your primary search engine, it’s past time you shopped around. There are great alternatives that do a better job on your choice of one or more of the metrics that might matter to you: better privacy, fewer ads (or more-relevant ads, if you want), less AI slop, etc.

Delivery Songs

Duration 7:01

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Here in the UK, ice cream vans will usually play a tune to let you know they’re set up and selling¹. So when you hear Greensleeves (or, occasionally, Waltzing Matilda), you know it’s time to go and order yourself a ninety-nine.

On a verdant manicured lawn under a summer sky, two parents walk barefoot after their young child, who is running towards a traditionally-coloured yellow-and-white British ice cream van with visible branding reading 'fresh dairy ice cream' and '99 flake'. — Bet you want a double-99 with monkey’s blood now, right? If not, maybe hearing the chime will make the difference.

Imagine my delight, then, when I discover this week that ice cream vans aren’t the only services to play such jaunty tunes! I was sat with work colleagues outside İlter’s Bistro on Meşrutiyet Cd. in Istanbul, enjoying a beer, when a van carrying water pulled up and… played a little song!

And then, a few minutes later – as if part of the show for a tourist like me – a flatbed truck filled with portable propane tanks pulled up. Y’know, the kind you might use to heat a static caravan. Or perhaps a gas barbeque if you only wanted to have to buy a refill once every five years. And you know what: it played a happy little jingle, too. Such joy!

A grey-haired man wearing a t-shirt and blue jeans leans casually against the open doors of a white van that's visibly filled floor-to-ceiling with 19-litre 'water cooler style' water bottles, plus a pallet lifter. The van is parked between red-and-white striped cones on an Istanbul street. — In Istanbul, people put out their empty water bottles to be swapped-out for full ones by the water delivery man².

My buddy Cem, who’s reasonably local to the area, told me that this was pretty common practice. The propane man, the water man, etc. would all play a song when they arrived in your neighbourhood so that you’d be reminded that, if you hadn’t already put your empties outside for replacement, now was the time!

And then Raja, another member of my team, observed that in his native India, vegetable delivery trucks also play a song so you know they’re arriving. Apparently the tune they play is as well-standardised as British ice cream vans are. All of the deliveries he’s aware of across his state of Chennai play the same piece of music, so that you know it’s them.

It got me thinking: what other delivery services might benefit from a recognisable tune?

Bin men: I’ve failed to put the bins out in time frequently enough, over the course of my life, that a little jingle to remind me to do so would be welcome⁴! (My bin men often don’t come until after I’m awake anyway, so as long as they don’t turn the music on until after say 7am they’re unlikely to be a huge inconvenience to anybody, right?) If nothing else, it’d cue me in to the fact that they were passing so I’d remember to bring the bins back in again afterwards.
Fish & chip van: I’ve never made use of the mobile fish & chip van that tours my village once a week, but I might be more likely to if it announced its arrival with a recognisable tune.

Milkman: I’ve a bit of a gripe with our milkman. Despite promising to deliver before 07:00 each morning, they routinely turn up much later. It’s particularly troublesome when they come at about 08:40 while I’m on the school run, which breaks my routine sufficiently that it often results in the milk sitting unseen on the porch until I think to check much later in the day. Like the bin men, it’d be a convenience if, on running late, they at least made their presence in my village more-obvious with a happy little ditty!
Emergency services: Sirens are boring. How about if blue light services each had their own song. Perhaps something thematic? Instead of going nee-naw-nee-naw, you’d hear, say, de-do-do-do-de-dah-dah-dah and instantly know that you were hearing The Police.
Evri: Perhaps there’s an appropriate piece of music that says “the courier didn’t bother to ring your doorbell, so now your parcel’s hidden in your recycling box”? Just a thought.

Anyway: the bottom line is that I think there’s an untapped market for jolly little jingles for all kinds of delivery services, and Turkey and India are clearly both way ahead of the UK. Let’s fix that!

Footnotes

¹ It’s not unheard of for ~~cruel~~ clever parents to try to teach their young children that the ice cream van plays music only to let you know it’s sold out of ice cream. A devious plan, although one I wasn’t smart (or evil?) enough to try for myself.

² The official line from the government is that the piped water is safe to drink, but every single Turkish person I spoke to on the subject disagreed and said that I shouldn’t listen to… well, most of what the government says. Having now witnessed first-hand the disparity between the government’s line on the unrest following the arrest of the opposition’s presidential candidate and what’s actually happening on the ground, I’m even more inclined to listen to the people.

³ My gas delivery man should also have his own song, of course. Perhaps an instrumental cover of Burn Baby Burn?

⁴ Perhaps bin men could play Garbage Truck by Sex Bob-Omb/Beck? That seems kinda fitting. Although definitely not what you want to be woken up with if they turn the speakers on too early…

Feed Readers Beat Doomscrolling

The news has, in general, been pretty terrible lately.

Like many folks, I’ve worked to narrow the focus of the things that I’m willing to care deeply about, because caring about many things is just too difficult when, y’know, nazis are trying to destroy them all.

I’ve got friends who’ve stopped consuming news media entirely. I’ve not felt the need to go so far, and I think the reason is that I already have a moderately-disciplined relationship with news. It’s relatively easy for me to regulate how much I’m exposed to all the crap news in the world and stay focussed and forward-looking.

The secret is that I get virtually all of my news… through my feed reader (some of it pre-filtered, e.g. my de-crappified BBC News feeds).

FreshRSS screenshot showing a variety of feeds categorised as Communities, Distractions, Geeky, YouTube, News, Strangers, etc. Posts from yesterday and today are visible. — I use FreshRSS and I love it. But really: *any* feed reader can improve your relationship with the Web.

Without a feed reader, I can see how I might feel the need to “check the news” several times a day. Pick up my phone to check the time… glance at the news while I’m there… you know how to play that game, right?

But with a feed reader, I can treat my different groups of feeds like… periodicals. The news media I subscribe to get collated in my feed reader and I can read them once, maybe twice per day, just like a daily newspaper. If an article remains unread for several days then, unless I say otherwise, it’s configured to be quietly archived.

My current events are less like a firehose (or sewage pipe), and more like a bottle of (filtered) water.

Categorising my feeds means that I can see what my friends are doing almost-immediately, but I don’t have to be disturbed by anything else unless I want to be. Try getting that from a siloed social network!

Maybe sometimes I see a new breaking news story… perhaps 12 hours after you do. Is that such a big deal? In exchange, I get to apply filters of any kind I like to the news I read, and I get to read it as a “bundle”, missing (or not missing) as much or as little as I like.

On a scale from “healthy media consumption” to “endless doomscrolling”, proper use of a feed reader is way towards the healthy end.

If you stopped using feeds when Google tried to kill them, maybe it’s time to think again. The ecosystem’s alive and well, and having a one-stop place where you can enjoy the parts of the Web that are most-important to you, personally, in an ad-free, tracker-free, algorithmic-filtering-free space that you can make your very own… brings a special kind of peace that I can highly recommend.

WebDX: Does More Mean Better?

Enumerating Web features

The W3C‘s WebDX Community Group this week announced that they’ve reached a milestone with their web-features project. The project is an effort to catalogue browser support for Web features, to establish an understanding of the baseline feature set that developers can rely on.

That’s great, and I’m in favour of the initiative. But I wonder about graphs like this one:

The graph shows the increase in time of the number of features available on the Web, broken down by how widespread they are implemented across the browser corpus.

The shape of that graph sort-of implies that… more features is better. And I’m not entirely convinced that’s true.

Does “more” imply “better”?

Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of Web features that are excellent. The kinds of things where it’s hard to remember how I did without them. CSS grids are for many purposes an improvement on flexboxes; flexboxes were massively better than floats; and floats were an enormous leap forwards compared to using tables for layout! The “new” HTML5 input types are wonderful, as are the revolutionary native elements for video, audio, etc. I’ll even sing the praises of some of the new JavaScript APIs (geolocation, web share, and push are particular highlights).

But it’s not some kind of universal truth that “more features means better developer experience”. It’s already the case, for example, that getting started as a Web developer is harder than it once was, and I’d argue harder than it ought to be. There exist complexities nowadays that are barriers to entry. Like the places where the promise of a progressively-enhanced Web has failed (they’re rare, but they exist). Or the sheer plethora of features that come with caveats to their use that simply must be learned (yes, you need a <meta name="viewport">; no, you can’t rely on JS to produce content).

Meanwhile, there are technologies that were standardised, and that we did need, but that never took off. The <keygen> element never got implemented into the then-dominant Internet Explorer (there were other implementation problems too, but this one’s the killer). This made it functionally useless, which meant that its standard never evolved and grew. As a result, its implementation in other browsers stagnated and it was eventually deprecated. Had it been implemented properly and iterated on, we’d could’ve had something like WebAuthn over a decade earlier.

Which I guess goes to show that “more features is better” is only true if they’re the right features. Perhaps there’s some way of tracking the changing landscape of developer experience on the Web that doesn’t simply count enumerate a baseline of widely-available features? I don’t know what it is, though!

A simple web

Mostly, the Web worked fine when it was simpler. And while some of the enhancements we’ve seen over the decades are indisputably an advancement, there are also plenty of places where we’ve let new technologies lead us astray. Third-party cookies appeared as a naive consequence of first-party ones, but came to be used to undermine everybody’s privacy. Dynamic DOM manipulation started out as a clever idea to help with things like form validation and now a significant number of websites can’t even show their images – or sometimes their text – unless their JavaScript code gets downloaded and interpreted successfully.

A blog post, news article, or even an eCommerce site or social networking platform doesn’t need the vast majority of the Web’s “new” features. Those features are important for some Web applications, but most of the time, we don’t need them. But somehow they end up being used anyway.

Whether or not the use of unnecessary new Web features is a net positive to developer experience is debatable. But it’s certainly not often to the benefit of user experience. And that’s what I care about.

This blog post, of course, can be accessed with minimal features: it’s even available over ultra-lightweight Gemini at gemini://danq.me/posts/webdx-does-more-mean-better/, and I’ve also written it as plain text on my plain text blog (did you know about that?).

Work Slippers

Duration 5:28

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Last month my pest of a dog destroyed my slippers, and it was more-disruptive to my life than I would have anticipated.

A French Bulldog looks-on guiltily at a hand holding the remains of a pair of slippers that have been thoroughly shredded. — Look what you did, you troublemaker.

Sure, they were just a pair of slippers¹, but they’d become part of my routine, and their absence had an impact.

Routines are important, and that’s especially true when you work from home. After I first moved to Oxford and started doing entirely remote work for the first time, I found the transition challenging². To feel more “normal”, I introduced an artificial “commute” into my day: going out of my front door and walking around the block in the morning, and then doing the same thing in reverse in the evening.

It turns out that in the 2020s my slippers had come to serve a similar purpose – “bookending” my day – as my artificial commute had over a decade earlier. I’d slip them on when I was at my desk and working, and slide them off when my workday was done. With my “work” desk being literally the same space as my “not work” desk, the slippers were a psychological reminder of which “mode” I was in. People talk about putting on “hats” as a metaphor for different roles and personas they hold, but for me… the distinction was literal footwear.

And so after a furry little monster (who for various reasons hadn’t had her customary walk yet that day and was probably feeling a little frustrated) destroyed my slippers… it actually tripped me up³. I’d be doing something work-related and my feet would go wandering, of their own accord, to try to find their comfortable slip-ons, and when they failed, my brain would be briefly tricked into glancing down to look for them, momentarily breaking my flow. Or I’d be distracted by something non-work-related and fail to get back into the zone without the warm, toe-hugging reminder of what I should be doing.

It wasn’t a huge impact. But it wasn’t nothing either.

A pair of brown slippers, being worn, in front of a French bulldog asleep in her basket, her tongue sticking out. — The bleppy little beast hasn’t expressed an interest in my *replacement* slippers, yet. Probably because they’re still acquiring the smell of my feet, which I’m guessing is what interested her in the first place.

So I got myself a new pair of slippers. They’re a different design, and I’m not so keen on the lack of an enclosed heel, but they solved the productivity and focus problem I was facing. It’s strange how such a little thing can have such a big impact.

Oh! And d’ya know what? This is my hundredth blog post of the year so far! Coming on only the 73rd day of the year, this is my fastest run at #100DaysToOffload yet (my previous best was last year, when I managed the same on 22 April). 73 is exactly a fifth of 365, so… I guess I’m on track for a mammoth 500 posts this year? Which would be my second-busiest blogging year ever, after 2018. Let’s see how I get on…⁴

Footnotes

¹ They were actually quite a nice pair of slippers. JTA got them for me as a gift a few years back, and they lived either on my feet or under my desk ever since.

² I was working remotely for a company where everybody else was working in-person. That kind of hybrid setup is a lot harder to do “right”, as many companies in this post-Covid-lockdowns age have discovered, and it’s understandable that I found it somewhat isolating. I’m glad to say that the experience of working for my current employer – who are entirely distributed – is much more-supportive.

³ Figuratively, not literally. Although I would probably have literally tripped over had I tried to wear the tattered remains of my shredded slippers!

⁴ Back when I did the Blog Questions Challenge I looked at my trajectory and estimated I wouldn’t hit a hundred this year until a week later than now, so maybe I’m… accelerating?

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Duration 5:42

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I’d already read every prior book published by the excellent Becky Chambers, but this (and its sequel) had been sitting on my to-read list for some time, and so while I’ve been ill and off work these last few days, I felt it would be a perfect opportunity to pick it up. I’ve spent most of this week so far in bed, often drifting in and out of sleep, and a lightweight novella that I coud dip in and out of over the course of a day felt like the ideal comfort.

I couldn’t have been more right, as the very first page gave away. My friend Ash described the experience of reading it (and its sequel) as being “like sitting in a warm bath”, and I see where they’re coming from. True to form, Chambers does a magnificent job of spinning a believable utopia: a world that acts like an idealised future while still being familiar enough for the reader to easily engage with it. The world of Wild-Built is inhabited by humans whose past saw them come together to prevent catastrophic climate change and peacefully move beyond their creation of general-purpose AI, eventually building for themselves a post-scarcity economy based on caring communities living in harmony with their ecosystem.

Writing a story in a utopia has sometimes been seen as challenging, because without anything to strive for, what is there for a protagonist to strive against? But Wild-Built has no such problem. Written throughout with a close personal focus on Sibling Dex, a city monk who decides to uproot their life to travel around the various agrarian lands of their world, a growing philosophical theme emerges: once ones needs have been met, how does one identify with ones purpose? Deprived of the struggle to climb some Maslowian pyramid, how does a person freed of their immediate needs (unless they choose to take unnecessary risks: we hear of hikers who die exploring the uncultivated wilderness Dex’s people leave to nature, for example) define their place in the world?

Aside from Dex, the other major character in the book is Mosscap, a robot whom they meet by a chance encounter on the very edge of human civilisation. Nobody has seen a robot for centuries, since such machines became self-aware and, rather than consign them to slavery, the humans set them free (at which point they vanished to go do their own thing).

To take a diversion from the plot, can I just share for a moment a few lines from an early conversation between Dex and Mosscap, in which I think the level of mutual interpersonal respect shown by the characters mirrors the utopia of the author’s construction:

…

“What—what are you? What is this? Why are you here?”

The robot, again, looked confused. “Do you not know? Do you no longer speak of us?”

“We—I mean, we tell stories about—is robots the right word? Do you call yourself robots or something else?”

“Robot is correct.”

…

“Okay. Mosscap. I’m Dex. Do you have a gender?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

These two strangers take the time in their initial introduction to ensure they’re using the right terms for one another: starting with those relating to their… let’s say species… and then working towards pronouns (Dex uses they/them, which seems to be widespread and commonplace but far from universal in their society; Mosscap uses it/its, which provides for an entire discussion on the nature of objectship and objectification in self-identity). It’s queer as anything, and a delightful touch.

In any case: the outward presence of the plot revolves around a question that the robot has been charged to find an answer to: “What do humans need?” The narrative theme of self-defined purpose and desires is both a presenting and a subtextual issue, and it carries through every chapter. The entire book is as much a thought experiment as it is a novel, but it doesn’t diminish in the slightest from the delightful adventure that carries it.

Dex and Mosscap go on to explore the world, to learn more about it and about one another, and crucially about themselves and their place in it. It’s charming and wonderful and uplifting and, I suppose, like a warm bath: comfortable and calming and centering. And it does an excellent job of setting the stage for the second book in the series, which we’ll get to presently…

WordPress to ClassicPress

As I mentioned in my recent Blog Questions Challenge, I recently switched my blog from WordPress, which it had been running on for over 20 years of its 26 year history, to ClassicPress.¹ I’m aware that I’m not the only person for whom ClassicPress might be a better fit than WordPress², so I figured I should share the process by which I undertook the change.

Switching from WordPress to ClassicPress

Switching from WordPress to ClassicPress should be a non-destructive, 100% reversible process, but (even though I’ve got solid backups) I wasn’t ready to trust that, so I decided to operate on a copy of my site. I’m glad I did, because there were a couple of teething issues I needed to tackle before I could launch.

1. Duplicating the site

I took a simple approach to duplicating the site: (1) I copied the site directory, and (2) I copied the database, and (3) I set up a new subdomain to use for testing. Here’s how I did each step:

1.1. Copying the site directory

This should’ve been simple, but a du -sh revealed that my /wp-content/uploads directory is massive (I should look into that) and I didn’t want to clone it. And I didn’t want r need to clone my /wp-content/cache directory either. So I ran:

rsync -av --exclude=wp-content ./old-site-directory/ ./new-site-directory/ to copy everything except wp-content, and then
rsync -av --exclude=uploads --exclude=cache ./old-site-directory/wp-content/ ./new-site-directory/wp-content/ to copy wp-content except the uploads and cache subdirectories, and then finally
ln -s ./old-site-directory/wp-content/uploads ./new-site-directory/wp-content/uploads to symlink the uploads directory, sharing it between the two sites

1.2. Copying the database

I just piped mysqldump into mysql to clone from one database to the other:

mysqldump -uUSERNAME -p --lock-tables=false old-site-database | mysql -uUSERNAME -p new-site-database

I edited DB_NAME in wp-config.php in the new site’s directory to point it at the new database.

1.3. Setting up a new subdomain

My DNS is already configured with a wildcard to point (almost) all *.danq.me subdomains to this server already. I decided to use the name classicpress-testing.danq.me as my temporary/test domain name. To keep any “changes” to my cloned site to a minimum, I overrode the domain name in my wp-config.php rather than in my database, by adding the following lines:

define('WP_HOME','https://classicpress-testing.danq.me');
define('WP_SITEURL','https://classicpress-testing.danq.me');

Because I use Caddy/FrankenPHP as my webserver³, configuration was really easy: I just copied the relevant part of my Caddyfile (actually an include), changed the domain name and the root, and it just worked, even provisioning me out a LetsEncrypt SSL certificate. Magical⁴.

2. Switching the duplicate to ClassicPress

Now that I had a duplicate copy of my blog running at https://classicpress-testing.danq.me/, it was time to switch it to ClassicPress. I started by switching my wp-admin colour scheme to a different one in my cloned site, so it’d be immediately visually-obvious to me if I’d accidentally switched and was editing the “wrong” site (I also made sure I was logged-out of my primary, live site, so I was confident I wouldn’t break anything while I was experimenting!).

ClassicPress provides a migration plugin which checks for common problems and then switches your site from WordPress to ClassicPress, so I installed it and ran it. It said that everything was okay except for my (custom) theme and a my self-built plugins, which it understandably couldn’t check compatibility of. It recommended that I install Twenty Seventeen – the last WordPress default theme to not require the block editor – but I didn’t do so: I was confident that my theme would work anyway… and if it didn’t, I’d want to fix it rather than switch theme!

And then… it all broke.

3. Fixing what broke

After swiftly doing a safety-check that my live site was still intact, I started trying to work out why my site wasn’t broken. Debugging a ClassicPress PHP issue is functionally identical to debugging a similar WordPress issue, for obvious reasons: check the logs, work out what’s broken, realise it’s a plugin, disable that plugin while you investigate further, etc.

In my case, the “blocking” issues were:

Jetpack: this plugin does not play nicely with ClassicPress, presumably because it fails if it’s unable to register a block. Fortunately, I wasn’t actually using Jetpack for anything other than for VaultPress (which has saved my butt on at least one occasion and whose praises I sing), so I uninstalled Jetpack and installed the standalone plugin version of VaultPress instead, which worked fine.
EWWW Image Optimizer: I use this plugin to pregenerate WebP variants of my images, which I then serve using webserver rules. It’s not a complex job, and I should probably integrate the feature into my theme at some point, but for now I use this plugin. Version 8.0.0 of the plugin doesn’t work on ClassicPress 2.3.1, so I used WP-CLI to downgrade to the last version that does (7.7.0), and then it worked fine.
Dan’s Geocaching Log Reposter: a self-made plugin that copies my logs from geocaching websites stopped working properly, which I think is because ClassicPress is doing a more-aggressive job than WordPress at nonce validation on admin REST endpoints? I put a quick hack into my plugin to work around it, but I’ll need to look into this properly at some point.
Some other bits of my stack, e.g. CapsulePress (my Gemini/Spartan/Nex server), have their own copies of my database credentials, because I’ve been too lazy to centralise them into environment variables, and needed updating (but not until live switchover time).

Everything else worked fine, as far as I’ve determined in the weeks that have followed. My other plugins, which include Advanced Editor Tools (I should probably look into Enriched Editor), Antispam Bee, Google Authenticator, IndieAuth, Post Kinds, Post Snippets, Regenerate Thumbnails, Syndication Links, Webmention, WebSub, and WP-SCSS all “just worked”.

4. Completing the switchover

I ran the two sites in-parallel for a couple of weeks, with the ClassicPress one as a “read only” version (so I didn’t pollute my uploads directory!), but it was pretty unnecessary because it all worked pretty seamlessly, despite my complex stack of custom code. When I wanted to switch for-real, all I needed to do was swap the domain names over in my Caddyfile and edit the wp-config.php of my ClassicPress installation: step 1.3, but in reverse!

If you hadn’t been told⁵, you probably wouldn’t have even known I’d made a change: I suppress basically all infrastructure-identifying headers from my server output as a matter of course, and ClassicPress and WordPress are functionally-interchangeable from a front-end perspective⁶.

So what’s difference?

From my experience, here are the differences I’ve discovered since switching from WordPress to ClassicPress:

The good stuff

😅 ClassicPress has no Gutenberg/block editor. This would absolutely be a showstopper for many people, and that’s fine: I have nothing against the block editor (I use it basically every day elsewhere!), but I’ve never really used it on danq.me and don’t feel the need to change that! My theme, my workflow, and my custom plugins are all geared around the perfectly-good “classic” editor, and so getting a more-lightweight CMS by removing a feature I wasn’t using anyway falls somewhere between neutral and a blessing.
⚡The backend is fast again! One of the changes the ClassicPress team have been working on applying to WordPress is to strip out jQuery and other redundancies from the backend, and I love how much faster and lighter my editor interface is as a result. (With caveat; see below!)
🔌Virtually everything “just works”. With the few exceptions described above, everything works exactly as it does under WordPress. Which is what you’d hope for a fork that’s mostly “WordPress, but without the block editor”, right, but it’s still reassuring (and, for me, an essential feature). There are a few “new” features to do with paging through posts and the media library and they’re fine, I suppose, but not by themselves worth switching for (though it might be nice to backport them into WordPress!).

The bad stuff

🏷️ Adding tags to posts takes a step backwards. A side-effect of dropping jQuery is the partial loss of the autocomplete feature when selecting tags to add to a post. You still get a partial autocomplete, but not after typing a comma: you need to press enter to submit the tag you were writing and then start typing them next, which frankly sucks. This is because they’re relying on a <datalist>, which isn’t as full-featured as the Javascript solution WordPress employs. This bugs me almost enough to be a showstopper, but I gather it’s getting fixed in a near-future version.
🗺️ You’re in uncharted territory when things go wrong. One great benefit of WordPress is the side-effects of its ubiquity. If you have a query or a problem you can throw a stone at your favourite search engine and get a million answers… and some of them will even be right! If you have a problem in ClassicPress and it’s not shared with (or you’re not sure if it’s shared with) WordPress… you’re mostly on your own. The forums are good and friendly, but if you want a quick answer to something, you’re likely to have to roll your sleeves up and open some source code. I don’t mind this at all – when I first started using WordPress, this was the case, too! – but it might be a showstopper for some folks.

In summary: I’m enjoying using ClassicPress, even where there are rough edges. For me, 99% of my experience with it is identical to how I used WordPress anyway, it’s relatively lightweight and fast, and it’s easy enough to switch back if I change my mind.

Footnotes

¹ It saddens me that I have to keep clarifying this, but I feel like I do: my switch from WordPress to ClassicPress is absolutely nothing to do with any drama in the WordPress space that’s going on right now: in fact, I’d been planning to try it out since before any of the drama appeared. I appreciate that some people making a similar switch, including folks who use this blog post as a guide, might have different motivations to me, and that’s fine too. Personally, I think that ditching an installation of open-source WordPress based on your interpretation of what’s going on in the ecosystem is… short-sighted? But hey: the joy of open source is you can – and should! – do what you want. Anyway: the short of it is – the desire to change from WordPress to ClassicPress was, for me, 100% a technical decision and 0% a political one. And I’ll thank you for leaving any of your drama at the door if you slide into my comments, ta!

² Matt recently described ClassicPress as “the last decent fork attempt for WordPress”, and I absolutely agree. There’s been a spate of forks and reimplementations recently. I’ve looked into many of them and been… very much underwhelmed. Want my hot take? Sure, here you go: AspirePress is all lofty ideas and no deliverables. FreeWP seems to be the same, but somehow without the lofty ideas. ForkPress is a ghost. Speaking of ghosts, Ghost isn’t a WordPress fork; they have got some cool ideas though. b2evolution is even less a WordPress fork but it’s pretty cool in its own right. I’m not sure what clamPress is trying to achieve but I’ve not given it a serious look. So yeah: ClassicPress is, in my mind, the only WordPress fork even worth consideration at this point, and as I describe in this blog post: it’s not for everybody.

³ I switched from Nginx over the winter and it’s been just magical: I really love Caddy’s minimal approach to production configuration. The only thing I’ve been able to fault it on is that it’s not capable of setting up client-side SSL certificate authentication on a path, only on an entire domain, which meant I needed to reimplement the authentication mechanism I use on a small part of my (non-blog) internal infrastructure.

⁴ To be fair, it wouldn’t have been hard if I’d still be using Nginx, because I’d set up Certbot to use DNS-based vertification to issue me wildcard SSL certificates. But doing this in Caddy still felt magical.

⁵ And assuming you don’t religiously check my colophon page.

⁶ Indeed, I wouldn’t have considered a switch to ClassicPress in the first place if it wasn’t a closely-aligned-enough fork that I retained the ability to flip-flop between the two to my heart’s content! I’ve loved WordPress for over two decades; that’s not going to change any time soon… and if e.g. ClassicPress ceased tracking WordPress releases and the fork diverged too far for my comfort, I’d probably switch back to regular old WordPress!

Frustrating At Scale

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Large companies find HTML & CSS frustrating “at scale” because the web is a fundamentally anti-capitalist mashup art experiment, designed to give consumers all the power.

Miriam Eric Suzanne, 24 November 2019 (originally via Twitter)

This. This is what I needed to be reminded, today.

When somebody complains that the Web is hard to scale, they’re already working against the grain of the Web.

At its simplest – and the way we used to use it – a website is a collection of .html files, one of which might have a special name so the webserver knows to put it first.

Writing HTML is punk rock. A “platform” is the tool of the establishment.

Thanks, Mia.

Podcast Version

1979

1990

1998

2023

Footnotes

ISPs twenty years ago

ISPs today

Would you even want those services?

Footnotes

Footnotes

New laws for new technologies

A moment of philosophy

Contents

The Test

The Theory

Simple case with O(n) complexity

Achieving O(1) time complexity

The Implementation

What did I learn?

Lesson #1: programming more languages can make you better at all of them

Lesson #2: even when I’m rusty, I can rely on my fundamentals

Lesson #3: structural rules are harder to gearshift than syntactic ones

Okay, time for a new job

Footnotes

Podcast Version

Footnotes

Podcast Version

Footnotes

Enumerating Web features

Does “more” imply “better”?

A simple web

Podcast Version

Footnotes

Podcast Version

Switching from WordPress to ClassicPress

1. Duplicating the site

1.1. Copying the site directory

1.2. Copying the database

1.3. Setting up a new subdomain

2. Switching the duplicate to ClassicPress

3. Fixing what broke

4. Completing the switchover

So what’s difference?

The good stuff

The bad stuff

Footnotes