Oxford Station. Catching a train to Manchester for a get-together in memory of the Nightline Association, which will sadly be closing this year (although individual Nightlines will
doubtless soldier on just as they did before the Association).
Carrying a big ol’ bag of Three Rings swag to give to basically anybody who expresses even the slightest interest. 😅
Three Rings has been supporting Nightlines since before the Nightline Association and nowadays underpins voluntary work by hundreds of other charities including helplines like
Samaritans and Childline. Feeling sad that the Nightline Association is going away and looking for a new and rewarding way to volunteer? Come chat to me!
Never underestimate the power of people who are motivated by the good they can do in the world.
Today I was in awe of this team of unpaid volunteers who, having already given up their bank holiday weekend, worked through dinner and into the night to ensure the continued uptime of
a piece software that enables the listening service of emotional support and suicide helplines.
I’m spending the weekend volunteering for a nonprofit I founded (it’s almost as old as geocaching, at 23). We’re staying in a hotel at N 52°
36.184′ W 001° 53.869′. I’ve also gotten out to find a couple of localgeocaches.
But guess which room number the hotel have given me…
Found following a short hunt and a brief rummage after walking up the nearby footpath, with the help of a previous log which talked about crossing a fence (which I didn’t need to do, having come up
the correct way in the first place).
Some fellow volunteers and I are meeting at a hotel to the West of here for a weekend of making
software to help charities. When we meet up, I have a tradition of getting up early and finding a geocache or two before breakfast. Having exhausted the very-local supply of caches
on previous visits, and not wishing to miss out on the tradition on this, geocaching’s 25th birthday, I decided it was time to come further afield (and to finally solve this puzzle!…
I’m still stumped by its sibling, though!).
Nice container. Log slightly damp, but still usable. TFTC, and FP awarded for the enjoyable (once I spotted a pattern!) puzzle.
Woke early, as usual, for the first day of a weekend of volunteering, while staying at nearby Fairlawns. I’ve already tapped out the most-local caches to that hotel on previous stays, so for this morning’s walk I came further afield to find
this (and one of the two puzzle caches not too far away; that’s next, hopefully!)
This nice (topical!) container was an easy find once I poked my head into the right place. TFTC!
While adding an entry to OpenBenches (openbenches.org/bench/36677), I was struck by how much of an impact this woman – Jane Gregg –
must have made on her local community.
In this community garden in Bampton, in the Lake District, a bench dedicated to her includes not only a plaque summarising her achievements but it’s also been hand-carved with the words
“Jane an amazing human.”
Never one to let a hard day’s voluntary work keep me from a geocaching expedition, this afternoon I took a hot brisk walk up the scar to find this (and hopefully next another nearby!)
cache. Caught my breath sitting on a rock near the GZ, before pressing on. SL, TNLN, TFTC. FP awarded for such a delightful spot.
This bathroom at the holiday home where some fellow volunteers and I are doing some Three Rings work, this week, has a few unusual quirks,
including this surprisingly-shit bathroom:
The door has a lock… but there’s a second door which doesn’t.
Oh, and the first door’s lock doesn’t actually do anything. The door can still be opened from the outside.
The phone signal is so shit at this year’s 3Camp venue that I’ve had to climb a hill to take a call from a lawyer (whom I’m speaking to about my recent
redundancy). Nice to be outdoors, though!
A swift uphill scramble for my friend and fellow volunteer John and I, before dinner. We’re staying in a nearby farmhouse for a week of volunteer work, writing software to help charities. Beautiful view from the summit this evening! SL, TNLN, TFTC!
I’m off for a week of full-time volunteering with Three Rings at 3Camp, our annual volunteer hack week: bringing together our distributed
team for some intensive in-person time, working to make life better for charities around the world.
And if there’s one good thing to come out of me being suddenly and unexpectedly laid-off two days ago, it’s that I’ve got a shiny new laptop to do
my voluntary work on (Automattic have said that I can keep it).
Once all the matches have been burned, you can’t use them to light any more fires. It’s not the best metaphor, but it’s the one you’re getting.
If I were anybody else, you might reasonably expect me to talk about work-related burnout and how a sabbatical helped me to recover from it. But in a surprise twist1, my recent brush with burnout came during my sabbatical.
Somehow, I stopped working at my day job… and instead decided to do so much more voluntary work during my newly-empty daytimes – on top of the evening and weekend volunteering
I was already doing – that just turned out to be… too much. I wrote a little about it at the time in a post for RSS subscribers only, mostly
as a form of self-recognition: patting myself on the back for spotting the problem and course-correcting before it got worse!
When I got back to work2,
I collared my coach to talk about this experience. It was one of those broadening “oh, so that’s why I’m like this”
experiences:
The why of how I, y’know, got off course at the end of last year and drove myself towards an unhealthy work attitude… is irrelevant, really. But the actual lesson here that I took from
my sabbatical is: just because you’re not working in a conventional sense doesn’t make you immune from burnout. Burnout happens when you do too much, for too
long, without compassion for yourself and your needs
I dodged it at the end of November, but that doesn’t mean I’ll always be able to, so this is exactly the kind of thing a coach is there to help with!
Footnotes
1 Except to people who know me well at all, to whom this post might not be even remotely
surprising.
2 Among the many delightful benefits to my job is a monthly session with my choice of
coach. I’ve written a little about it before, but the short of it is that it’s an excellent perk.
The final weekend of my sabbatical was spent, like the first one, at a Three Rings event. As a side activity to the volunteer work, everybody was asked to put their name on a paper
plate and leave it on a particular table, allowing others to semi-anonymously add compliments, thanks, or kind words about its owner.
Comments on my plate:
* Your my faveriot [sic] brother (gee, I wonder who THAT one was from 😂)
* Always seems to be doing interesting things. A maverick! Thinks outside the box
* Awesome
* Thank you for inventing this (a) system & (b) corporate model!
* Always smiley and excited
* Thanks for always pushing lots of new features!
* Puts up with idiots willingly and patiently
* You literally dreampt this whole thing into existence!
* Quirky
* Innovative solutions!
* Helpful in all ways!
Today I put 550 Christmas cards into envelopes, sealed them, put address labels on them, and stamped them.
Because these were the “lick and stick” kind of envelopes rather than a self-sealing variety, I’ve been unable to taste anything except glue ever since.
Yesterday, I fulfilled the primary Three Rings objective I set for myself when I kicked off my sabbatical
twelve weeks ago and migrated the entire application to a new hosting provider (making a stack of related improvements along the way).
Months prior, I was comparing different providers and their relative merits, making sure that our (quirky and specific) needs could be met. Weeks beforehand, I was running a “dry run”
every four or five days, streamlining the process of moving the ~450GB1
of live data while minimising downtime. Days before the event felt like the countdown for a rocket launch, with final preparations underway: reducing DNS time-to-lives, ensuring users
knew about our downtime window, and generally fitting in a little time to panic.
I made reference on International Volunteer Day to how we needed to configure logrotate. When you’re building architecture for a system as gnarly as Three Rings, there’s
about a billion tools that need such careful tweaking2.
The whole operation was amazingly successful. We’d announced an at-risk period of up to six hours and I was anticipating it taking three… but the whole thing was completed within
a downtime window of just two and a half hours. And I fully credit all of the preparation time. It turns out that “measure twice, cut once” is a sensible strategy3.
It’s challenging to pull off a “big”, intensive operation like this in an entirely voluntary operation. I’m not saying I couldn’t have done it were I not on sabbatical, but
it’d certainly have been harder and riskier.
1Three Rings‘ user data is represented by a little under 70GB of MariaDB
databases plus about 380GB of organisational storage: volunteer photos, files, email attachments, and the like. Certainly not massive by comparison to, say, social media sites, search
engines, and larger eCommerce platforms… but large enough that moving it takes a little planning!
2 Okay, a billion tools to configure? That’s an exaggeration. Especially
now: since the architectural changes I’ve put in place this week, for example, production app server builds of Three Rings no require a custom-compiled build of Nginx (yes,
this really was something we used to need).
