Six or seven years ago our eldest child, then a preschooler, drew me a picture of the Internet1. I framed it and I
keep it on the landing outside my bedroom – y’know, in case I get lost on the Internet and need a map:
Lots of circles, all connected to one another, passing zeroes and ones around. Around this time she’d observed that I wrote my number zeroes “programmer-style” (crossed) and clearly
tried to emulate this, too.
I found myself reminded of this piece of childhood art when she once again helped me with a network map, this weekend.
As I kick off my Automattic sabbatical I’m aiming to spend some of this and next month building a new server architecture for Three Rings. To share my plans, this weekend, I’d
been drawing network diagrams showing my fellow volunteers what I was planning to implement. Later, our eldest swooped in and decided to “enhance” the picture with faces and names for
each server:
I don’t think she intended it, but she’s made the primary application servers look the grumpiest. This might well fit with my experience of those servers, too.
I noted that she named the read-replica database server Demmy2, after our dog.
You might have come across our dog before, if you followed me through Bleptember.
It’s a cute name for a server, but I don’t think I’m going to follow it. The last thing I want is for her to overhear me complaining about some possible future server problem and
misinterpret what I’m saying. “Demmy is a bit slow; can you give her a kick,” could easily cause distress, not to mention “Demmy’s dying; can we spin up a replacement?”
I’ll stick to more-conventional server names for this new cluster, I think.
Footnotes
1 She spelled it “the Itnet”, but still: max props to her for thinking “what would
he like a picture of… oh; he likes the Internet! I’ll draw him that!”
2 She also drew ears and a snout on the Demmy-server, in case the identity wasn’t clear to
me!
Kicking off day #1 of my three-month sabbatical from work at a hotel in Reading, at
a meeting with fellow Three Rings volunteers to discuss our organisational culture and values.
This evening I pushed against my illness-addled brain to try to sit in on the fortnightly Zoom call with the Three Rings dev team.
Unfortunately it seems like the primary symptom of my cold is an inability to string words together.
At one point, I apologised to by colleague “Beff” (I meant “Bev”, but I had just been talking about “Geoff”) that I couldn’t work out how to stop “scaring my screen” (well, I suppose
Halloween is coming up…). Then, realising my mistake, explained that it was a bit of a “ting-twister”.
Three Rings operates a Web contact form to help people get in touch with us: the idea
is that it provides a quick and easy way to reach out if you’re a charity who might be able to make use of the system, a user who’s having difficulty with the features of the software,
or maybe a potential new volunteer willing to give your time to the project.
But then the volume of spam it received increased dramatically. We don’t want our support team volunteers to spend all
their time categorising spam: even if it doesn’t take long, it’s demoralising. So what could we do?
It’s clearly spam, but if it takes you 2 seconds to categorise it and there are 30 in your Inbox, that’s still a drag.
Our conventional antispam tools are configured pretty liberally: we don’t want to reject a contact from a legitimate user just because their message hits lots of scammy keywords (e.g.
if a user’s having difficulty logging in and has copy-pasted all of the error messages they received, that can look a lot like a password reset spoofing scam to a spam filter). And we
don’t want to add a CAPTCHA, because not only do those create a barrier to humans – while not necessarily reducing spam very much, nowadays – they’re often terrible for accessibility,
privacy, or both.
But it didn’t take much analysis to spot some patterns unique to our contact form and the questions it asks that might provide an opportunity. For example, we discovered that
spam messages would more-often-than-average:
Fill in both the “name” and (optional) “Three Rings username” field with the same value. While it’s cetainly possible for Three Rings users to have
a login username that’s identical to their name, it’s very rare. But automated form-fillers seem to disproportionately pair-up these two fields.
Fill the phone number field with a known-fake phone number or a non-internationalised phone number from a country in which we currently support no charities.
Legitimate non-UK contacts tend to put international-format phone numbers into this optional field, if they fill it at all. Spammers often put NANP (North American Numbering Plan)
numbers.
Include many links in the body of the message. A few links, especially if they’re to our services (e.g. when people are asking for help) is not-uncommon in legitimate
messages. Many links, few of which point to our servers, almost certainly means spam.
Choose the first option for the choose -one question “how can we help you?” Of course real humans sometimes pick this option too, but spammers almost always
choose it.
None of these characteristics alone, or any of the half dozen or so others we analysed (including invisible checks like honeypots and IP-based geofencing), are reason to
suspect a message of being spam. But taken together, they’re almost a sure thing.
To begin with, we assigned scores to each characteristic and automated the tagging of messages in our ticketing system with these scores. At this point, we didn’t do anything to block
such messages: we were just collecting data. Over time, this allowed us to find a safe “threshold” score above which a message was certainly spam.
Even when a message fails our customised spam checks, we only ‘soft-block’ it: telling the user their message was rejected and providing suggestions on working around that or emailing
us conventionally. Our experience shows that the spammers aren’t willing to work to overcome this additional hurdle, but on the very rare ocassion a human hits them, they are.
Once we’d found our threshold we were able to engage a soft-block of submissions that exceeded it, and immediately the volume of spam making it to the ticketing system dropped
considerably. Under 70 lines of PHP code (which sadly I can’t share with you) and we reduced our spam rate by over 80% while having, as far as we can see, no impact on the
false-positive rate.
Where conventional antispam solutions weren’t quite cutting it, implementing a few rules specific to our particular use-case made all the difference. Sometimes you’ve just got to roll
your sleeves up and look at the actual data you do/don’t want, and adapt your filters accordingly.
The second of two caches found on a morning walk from the nearby Cambridge Belfry Hotel, where some fellow volunteers and I met yesterday for a meeting. This cache looked so close, but
being on the other side of the A428 meant that my route to get from one to the other side of the trunk road necessitated a long and circuitous route around half a dozen (ill-maintained)
pegasus crossings around the perimeter of two large roundabouts! Thankfully traffic was quiet at this point if a Saturday morning.
Cache itself was worth the effort though. Feels like it’s increasingly rare to find a large, appropriately-camouflaged, well looked-after cache in a nice location, so FP awarded. TFTC!
Even early on a Saturday morning, after a volunteering event the previous day at the hotel across the road, this highly-exposed GZ made me
feel vulnerable! It’s not as though anybody were actually watching me as I stood around nonchalantly at the GZ waiting for an opportunity
to make a search: a couple of shop workers setting up, maybe, and a handful of drivers going past… but what got me was that every time I looked up from my rummaging I spotted, in the
corner of my eye, a police officer standing to attention just on the other side of the car park, staring intently in my direction!
The copper in question, of course, was nothing more than a cardboard cut-out designed to spook shoplifters, but man that’s a chilling thing to spot in your peripheral vision when you’re
rooting around in the bushes for a concealed container in a quiet car park!
Signed the log and took a selfie with my law enforcement friend (attached) before getting back to my day. TFTC!
The elder child and I are staying nearby and couldn’t resist coming to a nearby cache with so many FPs. The name gave us a bit of a clue what we would be looking for but nothing could
have prepared us for for this imaginative and unusual container! FP awarded. Attached is very non-spoiler photo of us with our very own Incy
Wincies. Greetings from Oxfordshire!
But if I ever happen to be somewhere that the lottery results are being announced, I sometimes like to play a game I call Not The Lottery.2
Here’s how you play:
Set aside the money it would have cost for a ticket.
Think of the numbers you’d have played.
When those numbers don’t come up, congratulations: you just won not-wasting-your-money!3
Want to play Not The Lottery retroactively? Cool. I’ve made and open-sourced a tool for that. Hopefully it’ll load below
and you can choose some numbers (or take a Lucky Dip) and have it played through the entirety of EuroMillions history and see how much money you’d have won if you’d only played them
every week. Or, to look at things from a brighter perspective, how much you’ve saved by not playing. It’s almost-certainly in the thousands.
Loading game… please wait… (if it never loads, Dan
probably broke it; sorry!)
Winning the lottery
But that’s not what the question’s really about, is it? We don’t ask people “what would they do if they won the lottery?” because we think it’s likely to happen4
We ask them because… well, because it’s fun to fantasise.
And I sort-of gave the answer away on day 20 of Bloganuary: I’d do my “dream job”. I’d work (for free) for Three Rings, like I already do, except instead of spending a couple of hours a week on it on average I’d spend about ten times that. I’d use the
luxury of not having to work to focus on things that I know I can do to make the world a better place.
If money was no object, I’d spend more time with these happy folks (and many more besides), making volunteering easier for everybody.
Sure, there’s other things I’d do. They’re mostly obvious things that I’d hope anybody in my position would do. Pay off the mortgage (and for all the works currently being done to
infuriate the dog improve the house). Arrange some kind of slow-access trust or annuity for the people closest to me so that
they need not worry about money, nor about having to work out how to spend, save, or invest a lump sum. Maybe a holiday or two. Certainly some charitable donations. Perhaps buy
really expensive ketchup: the finest dijon ketchup5.
But mostly I’d just want to be able to live as comfortably as I do now, or perhaps slightly more, and spend a greater proportion of my time than I already do making charities work
better.
I don’t know if that makes me insufferably self-righteous or insufferably simple-minded, but it’s probably one of those.
Footnotes
1 I’ve been caught describing it as “a tax on people who are bad at maths”, but I don’t
truly believe that (although I am concerned about how readily we let people get addicted to problematic gambling and then keep encouraging them to play with dark patterns that hide
how low the odds truly are). I’ve even been known to buy a ticket or two, some years.
2 While writing this, I decided to retroactively play for last Friday, having not seen
whatever numbers came up. I guessed only one of them. Hurrah! That means I saved £2.50 by not playing!
3 There are, of course, other possible outcomes. You could have missed out on winning a
small prize – the odds aren’t that low – but the solution to this is simple: just keep playing Not The Lottery and you, as the “house”, will come out on top in the end.
Alternatively, it’s just-about possible that you could pluck the jackpot numbers from thin air, in which case: well done! You’re doing better than Derren Brown when in 2009 he
performed a pretty good magic trick but then turned it into a turd when he
“explained” it using pseudoscience (why not just stick with “I’m a magician, duh”; when you play the Uri Geller card you just make yourself look like an idiot). Let’s find a way
to use those superpowers for good. Because what you’ve got is a superpower. For context: if you played Not The Lottery twice a week, every week, without fail, for
393 years… you’d still only have a 1% chance of having ever predicted a jackpot in your five-lifetimes.
4 What if we lived in a world where we did use statistics to think about the
hypothetical questions we ask people? Would we ask “what would you do if you were stuck by lightning?”, given that the lifetime chance of being killed by lightning is significantly
greater than the chance of winning the jackpot, even if you play every draw!
It feels like a bit of a cop-out to say I’m already doing it, but that’s true. Well, mostly (read on and I’ll make a counterpoint!).
Automattic
Getting to hang out with my awesome teammates in various locations around the globe is a plus.
I’m incredibly fortunate that my job gets to tick so many of the boxes I’d put on a “dream job wishlist”:
I work on things that really matter. Automattic’s products make Web publishing and eCommerce available to the world without “lock-in” or proprietary bullshit. I
genuinely believe that Automattic’s work helps to democratise the Internet and acts, in a small way, as a counterbalance to the dominance of the big social media silos.
I get to make the world a better place by giving away as much intellectual property as possible. Automattic’s internal policy is basically “you don’t have
to ask to open source something; give away anything you like so long as it’s not the passwords”.1 Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation, and all that.
We work in a distributed, asynchronous way. I work from where I want, when I want. I’m given the autonomy to understand what my ideal working environment is and
make the most of it. Some mornings I’m just not feeling that coding flow, so I cycle somewhere different and try working the afternoon in a different location. Some weekends I’m struck
by inspiration and fire up my work laptop to make the most of it, because, y’know, I’m working on things that really matter and I care about them.
I work with amazing people who I learn from and inspire me. Automattic’s home to some incredibly talented people and I love that I’ve managed to find a place that
actively pushes me to study new things every day.
Automattic’s commitment to diversity & inclusion is very good-to-excellent. As well as getting work work alongside people from a hundred different countries and
with amazingly different backgrounds, I love that I get to work in one of the queerest and most queer-affirming environments I’ve ever been paid to be in.
I don’t know how I managed to select a photo of my fun-loving kickass volunteers that’s somehow more dry and corporate than the photo of my work colleagues above.
But you know where else ticks all of those boxes? My voluntary work with Three Rings. Let me talk you through that wishlist again:
I work on things that really matter. We produce the longest-running volunteer management system in the world3
We produce it as volunteers ourselves, because we believe that volunteering matters and we want to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to do as much good
as possible, and this allows us to give it away as cheaply as possible: for free, to the smallest and poorest charities.
I get to make the world a better place by facilitating the work of suicide helplines, citizens advice bureaus, child support services, environmental charities,
community libraries and similar enterprises, museums, theatres, charity fundraisers, and so many more good works. Back when I used to to helpline volunteering I might do a three
hour shift and help one or two people, and I was… okay at it. Now I get to spend those three hours making tools that facilitate many tens of thousands of volunteers to provide
services that benefit an even greater number of people across six countries.
We work in a distributed, asynchronous way. Mostly I work from home; sometimes we get together and do things as a team (like in the photo above). Either way, I’m
trusted with the autonomy to produce awesome things in the way that works best for me, backed with the help and support of a team that care with all their hearts about what we do.
I work with amazing people who I learn from and inspire me. I mentioned one of them yesterday. But seriously, I could
sing the praises of any one of our two-dozen strong team, whether for their commitment to our goals, their dedication to making the world better, their passion for quality and
improvement, their focus when producing things that meet our goals, or their commitment to sticking with us for years or decades, without pay, simply because they know that
what we do is important and necessary for so many worthy causes. And my fellow development/devops volunteers continue to introduce me to new things, which scratches my “drive-to-learn”
itch.
Three Rings’ commitment to diversity & inclusion is very good, and improving. We skew slightly queer and have moderately-diverse gender mix, but I’m especially
impressed with our age range these days: there’s at least 50 years between our oldest and youngest volunteers with a reasonably-even spread throughout, which is super cool (and the kind
of thing many voluntary organisations dream of!).
The difference
The biggest difference between these two amazing things I get to work on is… only one of them pays me. It’s hard to disregard that.
Sometimes at Automattic, I have to work on something that’s not my favourite project in the world. Or the company’s priorities clash with my own, and I end up implementing something
that my gut tells me isn’t the best use of my time from a “make the world a better place” perspective. Occasionally they take a punt on something that really pisses me off.
That’s all okay, of course, because they pay me, and I have a mortgage to settle. That’s fine. That’s part of the deal.
My voluntary work at Three Rings is more… mine. I’m the founder of the project; I 100% believe in what it’s trying to achieve. Even though I’ve worked to undermine the power of
my “founder privilege” by entrusting the organisation to a board and exec that I know will push back and challenge me, I feel safe fully trusting that everything I give to Three Rings
will be used in the spirit of the original mission. And even though I might sometimes disagree with others on the best way forward, I accept that whatever decision is made comes from a
stronger backing than if I’d acted alone.
Three Rings, of course, doesn’t pay me4. That’s why I can only
give them a few hours a week of my time. If I could give more, I would, but I have bills to pay so my “day job” is important too: I’m just so incredibly fortunate that that “day job”
touches upon many of the same drives that are similarly satisfied by my voluntary work.
If I didn’t have bills to pay, I could happily just volunteer for Three Rings. I’d miss Automattic, of course: there are some amazing folks there whom I love very much,
and I love the work. But if they paid me as little as Three Rings did – that is, nothing! – I’d choose Three Rings in a heartbeat.
But man, what a privileged position I’m in that I can be asked what my dream job is and I can answer “well, it’s either this thing that I already do, or this other thing that I already
do, depending on whether this hypothetical scenario considers money to be a relevant factor.” I’m a lucky, lucky man.
Footnotes
1 I’m badly-paraphrasing Matt, but you get the gist.
2 Automattic’s not hiring as actively nor voraciously as it has been for the last few
years – a recent downtown in the tech sector which you may have seen have heavily affected many tech companies has flooded the market with talent, and we’ve managed to take our fill
of them – we’re still always interested to hear from people who believe in what we do and have skills that we can make use of. And because we’re a community with a lot of
bloggers, you can find plenty of first-hand experiences of our culture online if you’d like to solicit some opinions before you apply…
3 Disclaimer: Three Rings is the oldest still-running volunteer management system
we’re aware of: our nearest surviving “competitor”, which provides similar-but-different features for a price that’s an order of magnitude greater, launched later in the same year we
started. But maybe somebody else has been running these last 22 years that we haven’t noticed, yet: you never know!
4 Assuming you don’t count a Christmas dinner each January – yes, really! (it turns out to
be cheaper to celebrate Christmas in January) – as payment.
My GPSr dropped me next to a far older bit of architecture than the one that hosts the cache, but found after a short search. I’m staying
nearby as part of a charity hackathon for a nonprofit I’m involved with, but came out for a walk and an explore
while between other tasks. SL, TFTC.
A nonprofit I volunteer with has, years ago, held our Christmas bash at the nearby Fairlawns Hotel. We haven’t been in several years and –
even though we missed Christmas itself by a full month! – decided to return here this year.
I’m often an early riser, especially when away from home, and enjoy making the most of the first light with a walk. Last time I was here there wasn’t a geocache in sight, so imagine my
delight to find that now there’s one right on the doorstep! Armed with a torch to fight off the renaming pre-dawn darkness, I braved the cold and came out to explore.
Found the obvious hiding spot quickly, but my sore back (Fairlawns’ mattress was somewhat softer than I enjoy!) made retrieval challenging! Still, a success once I was on my hands and
knees! TFTC, and Merry Christmas I guess!
Your product, service, or organisation almost certainly has a priority of constituencies, even if it’s not written down or otherwise formally-encoded. A famous example would be that expressed in the Web Platform Design Principles. It dictates how you decide between two competing
needs, all other things being equal.
At Three Rings, for example, our priority of constituencies might1 look
like this:
The needs of volunteers are more important than
The needs of voluntary organisations, which are more important than
Continuation of the Three Rings service, which is more important than
Adherance to technical standards and best practice, which is more important than
Development of new features
These are all things we care about, but we’re talking about where we might choose to rank them, relative to one another.
The priorities and constituencies portrayed in this illustration are ficticious. Any resemblence to real priorities and constituencies, whether living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
The priorities of an organisation you’re involved with won’t be the same: perhaps it includes shareholders, regulatory compliance, different kinds of end-users, employees, profits,
different measures of social good, or various measurable outputs. That’s fine: every system is different.
But what I’d challenge you to do is find ways to bisect your priorities. Invent scenarios that pit each constituency against itself another and discuss how they should
be prioritised, all other things being equal.
Using the example above, I might ask “which is more important?” in each category:
The needs of the volunteers developing Three Rings, or the needs of the volunteers who use it?
The needs of organisations that currently use the system, or the needs of organisations that are considering using it?
Achieving a high level of uptime, or promptly installing system updates?
Compliance with standards as-written, or maximum compatibility with devices as-used?
Implementation of new features that are the most popular user requests, or those which provide the biggest impact-to-effort payoff?
These might not be your answers to the same questions. They’re not even necessarily mine, and they’re even less-likely to be representative of Three Rings CIC. It’s just illustrative.
The aim of the exercise isn’t to come up with a set of commandments for your company. If you come up with something you can codify, that’s great, but if you and your stakeholders just
use it as an exercise in understanding the relative importance of different goals, that’s great too. Finding where people disagree is more-important than having a unifying
creed2.
And of course this exercise applicable to more than just organisational priorities. Use it for projects or standards. Use it for systems where you’re the only participant, as a thought
exercise. A priority of constituencies can be a beautiful thing, but you can understand it better if you’re willing to take it apart once in a while. Bisect your priorities, and see
what you find.
Footnotes
1 Three Rings doesn’t have an explicit priority of constituencies: the example I give is
based on my own interpretation, but I’m only a small part of the organisation.
Ruth wrote an excellent post this month entitled Wonder Syndrome.
It attempts to reframe imposter syndrome (which is strongly, perhaps disproportionately, present in tech fields) as a
positive indicator that there’s still more to learn:
Being aware of the boundaries of our knowledge doesn’t make us imposters, it makes us explorers. I’m going to start calling mine “Wonder Syndrome”, and allowing myself to be awed by
how much I still have to learn, and then focusing in and carrying on with what I’m doing because although I may not reach the stars, I’ve come a long way up the mountain. I can learn
these things, I can solve these problems, and I will.
I don’t recall exactly what I’m advising a fellow Three Rings developer to do, here, but I don’t think he’s happy about it.
I just spent a week at a Three Rings DCamp (a “hackathon”, kinda), and for the umpteenth time had the experience of feeling like
everybody thinks I know everything, while on the inside I still feel like I’m still guessing a third of the time (and on StackOverflow for another third!).
The same’s true at work: people ask me questions about things that I suppose, objectively, are my “specialist subjects” – web standards, application security, progressive enhancement,
VAT for some reason – and even where I’m able to help, I often get that nagging feeling like
there must be somebody better than me they could have gone to?
You’ve probably seen diagrams like this before. After all: I’m not smart or talented enough to invent anything like this and I don’t know why you’d listen to anything I have to say on
the subject anyway. 😂
You might assume that I love Ruth’s post principally because it plays to my vanity. The post describes two kinds of knowledgeable developers, who are differentiated primarily by their
attitude to learning. One is satisfied with the niche they’ve carved out for themselves and the status that comes with it and are content to rest on their laurels; the other is driven
to keep pushing and learning more and always hungry for the next opportunity to grow. And the latter category… Ruth’s named after me.
Wait, what if I’m not‽ Have I been faking it this entire blog post?
Bnd while I love the post, my gut feeling to being named after such an ideal actually makes me slightly uncomfortable. The specific sentence that gets me is (emphasis mine):
Dans have no interest in being better than other people, they just want to know more than they did yesterday.
I wish that was me, but I’m actually moderately-strongly motivated by a desire to feel like I’m the smartest person in the room! I’m getting this urge under control (I’m pretty
sure I was intolerable as a child and have been improving by instalments since then!). Firstly, because it’s an antisocial pattern to foster, but also because it limits my ability to
learn new things to have to go through the awkward, mistake-filled “I’m a complete amateur at this!” phase. But even as I work on this I still get that niggling urge, more often than
I’d like, to “show off”.
Of course, it could well be that what I’m doing right now is catastrophising. I’m taking a nice thing somebody’s said about me, picking the one part of it that I find hardest to feel
represents me, and deciding that I must be a fraud. Soo… imposter syndrome, I guess. Damn.
Or to put it a better way: Wonder Syndrome. I guess this is another area for self-improvement.
(I’m definitely adopting Wonder Syndrome into my vocabulary, as an exercise in mitigating imposter syndrome. If you’ve not read Ruth’s post in full, you should go and do that next.)
