This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
Happy Dead Dad Day to those who celebrate (which I guess, in reality, is just me and my sisters).
Ah well. At least we’ve now got (some) electricity in (some of) the house: that’s an exciting development. And we’ve got somewhere to live for the next two weeks: that’s good news, too.
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
Note to self: when running a big ol’ 13 amp dehumidifier through an extension cable that’s longer than you need, do not leave the excess cable on the spool, or else what you’ve made is
a 13 amp electromagnet and that shit gets hot. 😅
(Fortunately nobody is stupid enough to sell me a 10 metre, 13 amp extension cable without a thermal cut-out.)
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
Sometimes I feel like I’m resting on my laurels.
The most-important thing that I’ve given to the world is almost-certainly Three Rings. Three Rings facilitates several
volunteer-years of volunteer work every day. Over the last 23 years it’s become so essential a service that several major charities – and innumerable smaller grassroots groups
– can’t conceive of how they functioned without it.
A distant second is probably FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, through which I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to change their name for free. Plus,
through this I’ve learned enough about the law that I’ve been able to support people fighting discriminatory behaviour by high street banks, and trans kids whose parents don’t support
their identity, and dual-citizens standing up against illiberal laws in their ‘other’ countries, and divorcees whose estranged exes won’t let them share their name with their children.
Everything else is a far-distant third. All the voluntary work, all the open-source, all the… everything… will probably never leave a mark so significant as, y’know, those two.
(If any of this sounds like a humblebrag, I’m sorry: that’s truly not my intention.)
What if I waste the second half of my adult life producing… nothing? At least: nothing of even remotely-comparable value? Have I “peaked”? Have I already done the most-good for the
world that I ever will? Where will that leave me in five, ten, or twenty years?
Ultimately, the problem is that I might never be “enough” for my own standards. Possibly what I need isn’t to “make more things”, it’s to “have more therapy”!
But for now: this is what weighs on me from time to time.
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
I feel like I’ve spent the last week or so half-assing everything. Both at work and at home I’ve started countless tasks but finished almost none.
Not entirely sure what’s gotten me. Some opportunistic bug that’s left me feeling run-down, but not quite enough to call myself “sick”? An insufficiency of sleep? Too damn little
sunlight this time of year? Not enough fibre (which is apparently the solution to everything this year)???
Whatever it is, my body and brain wish I were hibernating, and are making known their displeasure at my having to do useful things like wrangle children and code. Thinking’s a little
bit like wading through treacle.
Wake me when it’s spring. Meanwhile, I’ve picked out two tasks that, if I can complete today, will at least make me feel like I’ve achieved something this
week. Let’s see how we get on.
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
At first I couldn’t get behind the “reboot to 2016” trend. It feels like if you want a nostalgic “simpler time” you need
to go back around two decades, not one1… plus 2016 wasn’t even that great, was
it?2
RIP.
But so far, I’ve got to admit, 2026 feels like it’s off to a… challenging start, too. Several of the folks closest to me seem to be struggling, and it sucks.
Don’t get me wrong: 2026 doesn’t suck like 2012 sucked. It definitely doesn’t suck like 2017 sucked.3
But… I don’t know, it just feels like the first couple of weeks of 2026 have been… “playing on hard mode”.
Not pictured: the dog. Because as much as I love her, I don’t feel like she’s “got my back” like everybody else depicted here.
Fortunately, I’m backed by the same kickass family team that handled the (tough!) challenges of those previous years, so I’m confident that
we’ve got this.
But for a couple of moments, I’ve been enticed by the idea that maybe we could reboot ourselves back a decade! Wouldn’t it be nice if wishing something hard enough could make it so!
Anyway: better get back to trying to make this year… better. There’s lots of time left to turn it around, at least.
Footnotes
1 Although the trend’s been spearheaded by Gen-Zs, so I guess 2006 will be earlier than
they can remember, if they were born at all!
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
It’s Thanksgiving, and so the vast majority of my team and wider colleagues – who are based in the US – are off. That’s fine, I figured: a chance to me to get my heads down for some
undistracted coding time.
The Universe had a different idea:
On the upside, today I learned a lot about the internals of the system that was at fault. 🤪
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
I hate being ill.
Not (just) for the obvious and immediate reasons: (this time around: the nausea, the musculoskeletal aches, the dizziness) the physical symptoms.
It’s a psychological issue I get hung up on. It feels wastefully unproductive to put aside time to rest and recover; extravagantly selfish to take care of myself before others: an
unearned luxury to lie in bed while the rest of the world works.
Clearly there’s a deeper issue here. Feeling (seen as?) underproductive or not pulling my weight is a real hangup for me. I’ve long established a pecking order of my priorities that
puts my self-care… pretty low down.
That turns out to be a general psychological sticking point for me, probably for most of my life. I’ve been working on it for a few years, though, and I think I’m getting better at it.
This morning, I managed to stop myself from staggering downstairs to help ensure the kids got up and ate breakfast, before a bleary-eyed stagger to my desk to check my work email.
Instead, I’m still just lying here in bed, an hour after my alarm rang.
I still hate being ill. But maybe I’m getting better (at it)?
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
Things lost by the eldest child by the end of her first two weeks of secondary school:
Art sketchpad
Art apron
Scientific calculator
Ruler
Pair of compasses
Class timetable (since rediscovered)
Umbrella
Shoes 🤯
I can’t point fingers: I was at least as absent-minded myself.
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
By a convenience of dates, I can today count in exact months how long I’ve spent in each of three phases of my life:
A child, with my birth name: 216 months
An adult, still with my birth name: 98 month
An adult, now with my assumed name: 222 months
(I drew a pretty pie chart but a crash ate it.)
Or in other numbers: I’ve now spent ~70% of my adult life, or ~41% of my entire life, living by a name I chose for myself.
I used a deed poll to change my name. And nowadays – with several iterations of my personal documentation issued over the 18½ years I’ve been using my name – it doesn’t even come up any
more, except when somebody observes “hey, that’s an unusual name you’ve got there!” I haven’t even looked at my deed poll in over a decade, for example. My name today is more
well-established as the one I was given at birth was by the time I reached adulthood.
And so it occurred to me this weekend, while I was reimplementing FreeDeedPoll.org.uk: because I was born in Scotland, there’s no reason I can’t also get my name changed on the
one remaining bit of documentation that still has my birth name: my birth certificate! Scottish law allows me to have this retroactively changed for a modest fee, which would result in
a re-issued birth certificate that showed “Dan Q” (with my birth name included as an “also known as”).
I’m flip-flopping on whether I should. Want to see my pros/cons lists?
Pros:
It’s the one last (changeable) thing that could reflect my actual name
It feels a little weird nowadays when I bump into my old name (e.g. on my first degree certificate, which I had to dig out earlier this year for a job application)
It’d be nice to understand the Scottish process, as (via FreeDeedPoll.org.uk) I end up helping lots of people to change their name
Cons:
I don’t need it; I’ve got all the documentation I could ever need and much, much more in my name; it’ll probably make no material difference to my life
It seems symbolically like a rejection of the past, or of my family, or of an attempt to rewrite history, all of which feel icky
It’s not free!
I don’t know which way I’ll eventually fall on this. Considering how… inconsequential it’d be, either way, to my day-to-day life… it’s surprising how much of an itch it is, at the back
of my brain!
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
Last night, an undermaintained VPS of mine went kaput.
The data’s all fine, and most of the services I was running on it came back up in new homes without difficulty, but just a handful of things are still down, including textplain.blog and
freedeedpoll.org.uk, ugh.
Not the best start to a Friday when I’ve got a backlog of day-job work to do.
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
Outside of Christmas Day, I don’t often get to use 6+ hobs and both ovens simultaneously, but I appreciate the ability to do so when I need them.
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
I spent most of a day getting my new development environment set up, because I kept hitting issues that nobody at my new employer had experienced before. A “perfect storm” of
coincidences that conspired together to completely wreck my chance of a simple setup.
The factors?
Apple’s M4 processors remove the SVE architecture and its instruction set, which was present in the M1 through M3
The Colima dockerisation tool still reports to arm64 containers that SVE is available
Java < 24 will, by default, use SVE for some functions if it’s told that it’s available
Opensearch 2.x will not run on Java > 23
If any one of those statements were not true, I wouldn’t have had any trouble. But the combination of all four of them meant that I was getting proper segfault-death crashes.
I blame Apple. Who removes instructions from a processor within the same family‽ (I’m sure that in reality there’s probably some important reason for it that’s beyond my ken, but
still!)
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
Embarrassingly, it took until 2018 before Three Rings implemented pronouns in a way
I could be proud of (and it’s only improved since then!). But it still gives me a smug satisfaction, every time I see some hateful shit mock respectful pronoun use, to think how my
software would respond to them.
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
In case I wasn’t having a challenging enough fortnight… while playing in a pool with the kids I accidentally smashed my face into the side of the pool. 😢.
Time to check when my (ex-)work private dental cover expires, I guess. Really hoping it’s not, like, today or something.
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks
for being part of RSS Club!
I imagine that many people take a sabbatical or other extended break from work in an effort to avoid (or recover from) burnout.
But obviously that’s not the way I fly. Clearly my game’s a bit different.
Something something Icarus something something.
My project to move Three Rings servers, which I’d written about once or twice before I completed it on Wednesday, has weighed heavily in my mind my many moths, and has almost-completely occupied it since the start of my sabbatical. Even before that, the project was “owned” by a different volunteer at Three Rings from whom I took over after their progress stalled (their life got in the way – life has a habit of doing that – and it’s perhaps only
because I expected to spend several months away from my “day job” that I felt confident to take over from where he left off), and I’ve had a peripheral involvement in it since… well, a
long while ago.
And it turns out it’s been hard.
Had I fully-appreciated the scale of the “server move project” I was taking over when the reins were passed to me… I might have selected a beverage with a higher ABV…
The work… is impactful: it paves the way for the next generation of Three Rings‘ ability to grow and support more tools, more volunteers, and more voluntary
organisations… as well as making a clean break with some architectural baggage we’d picked up over our last, y’know, twenty-two fucking years of providing this service. That
impact might not be felt on day one (although I’m already hearing good thing about real-world performance gains), but it supports the long-term growth and stability of this wonderful
system: it’ll pay off in time.
But the weight of the problem didn’t just come from the eventual benefit it’d one-day provide… it came from the risk of failing. I’m a developer first and a devops person
second, and I’ve made my fair share of mistakes in getting to the point where I’m at long last as comfortable with the latter as I am with the former. But the cost of a mistake today is
orders of magnitude more that what it would have been, say, one and a half to two decades ago. Three Rings isn’t just “some tool that supports volunteering”, any more: it’s
become a critical part of charity infrastructure supporting multiple volunteer-years of effort every single day. There are organisations who’ve never known any other
way of working, who absolutely depend upon it.
If Three Rings completely fails today then (for a hopefully-short period while they adapt to the change): soup kitchens and food banks struggle to run, suicide helplines can’t
get enough counsellors onto calls, community libraries can’t coordinate their volunteers and fail to open their doors when they should, motorcyclists don’t get told which hospitals to
deliver vital blood donations to… oh, and that one volunteer-run pole-dancing class that uses the system doesn’t schedule a lesson this week, I guess?
My point is: if I fucked-up the specification of a server, of the strategy for a low-downtime data transfer, or broke the DNS configuration mid-flight… and didn’t catch my mistake in
time… then it’s not inconceivable that somebody could die.
Which is a strange feeling when you’re doing voluntary work on a computer system that you invented mostly to prove to yourself that you could, on a lazy weekend when you were barely
into your twenties. It seems that somewhere along the journey, the stakes can change.
You can have all the monitoring and notifications in the world and still sleep badly at night, it turns out.
It turns out that the pressure was getting to me for a while there. That may have been evidenced to others by the huge sigh of relief that I’m sure my fellow volunteers on our “launch
party” Zoom call heard when the servers were moved and (almost) everything worked perfectly first time. But for me, the realisation came a little over a day later.
A thing came up. The specifics aren’t important, but the thing that came up – shortly after everything went so wonderfully well and the new Three Rings server architecture was
deployed – fell firmly within the categories of (a) “family/home life” and (b) “this thing needs somebody to champion it for a few weeks and make sure it gets sorted out”. And as the
rusty gears of project management started to turn within my brain started I began thinking about what it’d take to be the one to pick-up-and-run with this new piece of work…
and I realised that I simply didn’t have enough spoons.
Even thinking about what to do next was exhausting. I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it.
That’s when I realised, yesterday afternoon, that I’d allowed myself to stray perilously close to burnout.
Don’t be fooled by my tone. This is a healthy observation. Spotting when I to slow down before crashing is infinitely superior to, y’know, afterwards.
My mistake these last few weeks has been to focus on time, and the superfluity of it with which I imagined myself to have.
Being on my sabbatical, I figured that I’d temporarily gained up-to-40 hours a week for “free”, and reasoned that I could just bolt some significant portion of that on top of the
up-to-10 hours a week I was already giving to Three Rings. But while time works like that, it’s not the only resource that you “spend” when you’re giving your entire focus
to a deep, detailed, and complicated project. In fact, focussing on time is incredibly deceptive, because it tricks you into completely sidestepping any consideration for the mental
effort your mind’s engaged in. An effort that takes place even in your “downtime”.
A critical project with high stakes and which stokes your passion can quickly grow into something that occupies your thoughts when you’re trying to unwind… and when you’re trying to
socialise… and when you’re trying to sleep. I’d been burning hard at my server move project for months without letting my brain take a break, and it took until the job was
complete before I stopped and thought for even a moment that “hey, that was fucking exhausting wasn’t it?”
So yeah. I’mma thinking I’ll take a few days off of doing “projects”. Quick wins, tasks that take less than a day and can be put down at any time… those are fine. But anything that
can’t be set aside and forgotten about probably doesn’t belong in my head until at least next week.
Tomorrow Later today, but after I’ve slept… I’m going to try to have a day in which I do very little: some childwrangling, of course, some fun activities, some socialising with friends in the evening. And then see if I can carry on that vibe
throughout the weekend. For once in my life, to stop picking up new things, and just coast for a while with the things I’m already carrying.
I’ve learned the hard way that trying to power-on through this particular kind of tiredness is a recipe for disaster. I’m proud that I’ve (at long last!) gained a level of
self-awareness to spot that I was on a path to burnout without actually reaching that place of total uselessness. So now it’s time to stop, recharge, and then start
moving again.
