Tag: three rings
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Geohashing expedition 2026-10-04 51 -2
A pre-dawn walk around East Bristol from a Three Rings event took me to within 16 metres... but not quite all the way to... a geohashpoint.
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A Three Rings development sub-team seems to have developed a habit of making production server changes at in-person events, right before meals are served. On at least one previous occasion this has led to them missing out on dinner as they monitored and maintained at-risk servers when they ought to be eating.
Until the servers are stable, they don't get their food.
They call it the "crash diet".
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Found GC85TVQ Out Of Office
This checkin to GC85TVQ Out Of Office reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. I expected not to have opportunity for a second attempt at this today, but my schedule opened up somewhat when the fire alarm went off at the hotel and we had to evacuate! As hotel guests and …
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Did not find GC85TVQ Out Of Office
This checkin to GC85TVQ Out Of Office reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. I'm spending the weekend in the hotel nearby, for the AGM of a nonprofit I'm involved with. This morning I realised they I had a spare quarter of an hour before a meeting and wondered if I …
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How do people blog for thirty years without running out of things to say?
My fellow volunteer Oliver Earl has been picking up on his blogging and asks, with reference to my archives... how do people blog for thirty years without running out of things to say? And then he comes to the correct conclusion:
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British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres
In March 8, 2026, British Columbia moved their clocks to a year-round Pacific Daylight Savings Time, and doubtless broke a lot of software. Every time I work on better timezone support for Three Rings, this is the kind of story that terrifies me!
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Working with an old codebase today, I moved a method from one file to another. CI was happy.
Then I realised the method didn't have any automated tests, so I wrote one. It turns out its entire (new) file didn't have any, so my change would improve test coverage. Nice.
But it didn't. CI complained that test coverage had dropped. Wait, what? All I did was move some code and add a unit test.
Then I realised that the coverage analysis tool was only counting files that actually contained any tested code. By adding a test to part of a previously-untested file, that file became part of the scored codebase. Uh-oh.
Looked deeper. Turns out the code coverage tool was also counting the test files themselves as being part of the code-under-test.
Fixed all of the above. Code coverage score dropped by about 40%. 😱
Now I've got more work to do.
Happy Friday. Check what your coverage tool is inspecting, folks.
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Bringing Three Rings volunteers together: doing remote-first in person, and what to eat in a crisis
JTA wrote a LinkedIn post about Three Rings, its remote-first culture, doing things in person, and crisis management, and it's brilliant.
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Molly guard in reverse
In his Unsung blog, Marcin Wichary's shared the concept of a 'reverse molly guard', which is awesome. I didn't actually know the originating term 'molly guard' until I saw it, though, although I've definitely seen (and implemented) then before. Hey: d'ya wanna hear about a molly guard I added to Three Rings the other year?
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Wood-Fired
This year's 3Camp venue had a wood-fired pizza oven, so I signed-up for a shift of cooking for my fellow volunteers and thoroughly enjoyed making and baking a monumental amount of dough.
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There was no mixing bowl in the house large enough to make enough pizza dough to feed all of the Three Rings volunteers present at this year's 3Camp, so I just had to pour out all the ingredients onto the surface and work from there.
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Dan, a white man with a ponytail of blue hair and a goatee beard, uses his hands to gather a huge pile of flour on a marble worksurface in a spacious kitchen.
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Found GCARTJB Stop, Look... er... Listen?
I'm volunteering at the building right next door to this bridge, this week, working on software that helps charities... among them, Samaritans! So finding this thematic cache was a must-do for the younger geokid and I on our lunch break today. A quick and easy find thanks to the clear telegraphing in the description, aided by our direction of approach. It's a wonderful large bridge, and we got to watch a train zoom along the tracks beneath us as we crossed.
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Some days, developing Three Rings is about being hunched over a keyboard alone in the middle of the night, swearing at Rubygem incompatibilities.
But just ocassionally it's about getting together in beautiful places with some of the most dedicated geeks I know... to swear about Rubygem incompatibilities.
Either way, a walk in the garden can lead to the insight that gets you to the solution.
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A beautiful country house with a huge garden.
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Not even thanks to Daylight Saving but just because I felt energised and excited, I got up to watch the sunrise this morning... before starting work on a new Three Rings feature!
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The sunrise as seen through the gates of a vineyard's courtyard.
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Found GCARTJK Hencote Lane
Some fellow volunteers and I are staying in the nearby Hencote Farm for a week of work on software that helps charities work more efficiently. As has become a longstanding tradition for me at these events, I woke early for a walk and this morning was treated, as I made my way through the vineyards, to the especially wonderful view across the valley.