Tag: three rings
-
My first task this International Volunteer Day is to test a pull request that aims to fix a bug with Three Rings' mail merge fields functionality. As it's planned to be a hotfix (direct into production) we require extra rigor and more reviewers than code that just goes into the main branch for later testing on our beta environment.
My concern is that fixing this bug might lead to a regression not described by our automated tests, so I'm rolling back to a version from a couple of months ago to compare the behaviour of the affected tool then and now. Sometimes you just need some hands-on testing!
Alt
Screenshot showing web application Three Rings viewed on a local development machine, being used to compose an email about International Volunteer Day. A merge field called 'first_name' is included in the email, and it's hand-annotated with the question 'working?'. Alongside, GitHub Desktop shows that we've rolled-back to a revision from two months ago.
-
Happy International Volunteer Day! Volunteering rocks.
As I'm on sabbatical, I'm in the lucky position of being able to spend most of the day on a volunteer project very close to my heart: Three Rings. Three Rings is a 22-year-old web-based service produced by volunteers, for volunteers. The software service we produce supports the efforts of around 60,000 volunteers working at charities and other voluntary organisations around the globe.
Alt
Dan, a white man with a goatee-style beard and long hair tied back, wearing a black t-shirt with an abstract pride rainbow, holds a mug of coffee in one hand and gives a thumbs-up with the other. Behind him, three computer screens show a mixture of code, source control, chat, email, and web browser windows. His desk is cluttered.
I'll be posting throughout the day about some of the different tasks I take on. My volunteer role with Three Rings is primarily a developer/devops one, but it takes all sorts to make a project like this work (even if my posts look biased towards the technical stuff)!
But first: coffee.
-
Stuck in a Lift
About twenty years ago, I spent three hours playing I-Spy in a broken-down elevator. And in doing so, I learned two things about my friend Fiona.
-
After a morning of optimising a nonprofit's reverse proxy configuration, I feel like I've earned my lunch! Four cheese, mushroom and jalapeño quesapizzas, mmm...
Alt
Gas stovetop.a frying pan contains a tortilla wrap topped with tomato sauce, cheese, mushrooms, and jalapeños. Beside its a plate containing a completed quesapizza: two crispy tortilla wraps sandwiching their contents.
-
Sabbatical Magic
Two weeks into my extended break from work and on my way home from Spain, I've discovered something magical about a sabbatical: it frees me from my compulsion to think about next week's work, at the weekend.
-
Bluesky and enshittification
Cory Doctorow's post this week about how Bluesky's model isn't (yet) immune to enshittification matches my reasoning for not using it, too. But also points out a hypocrisy in my own behaviour for so-far failing to apply a "Ulysses Pact" model to Three Rings.
-
Bad Names for Servers
Not for the first time, our eldest child has drawn me a network diagram. It's cute, but I've outright refused to name one of the new servers I'm provisioning after our dog. Here's why...
-
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.
Alt
Dan sits in front of two laptops (one of which shows a photo of an echidna for some reason), in a meeting room full of casually-dressed volunteers.
-
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".
I should just go to bed, right?
-
Me: "This weekend I need to update these buildout scripts for Debian 12 and implement a new provider middleware."
Dog's expression: "Or we could just go for a walk?"
Me: "Or we could just go for a walk, sure."
Alt
French Bulldog, outdoors, on a lead, her tongue sticking out.
-
Roll Your Own Antispam
The Web contact form of a nonprofit I founded started attracting a huge volume of spam, and conventional tools weren't helping. But a little analysis allowed us to block almost all of it without compromising on accessibility, privacy, or the false-positive rate.
-
Found GC51F07 Knapwell one and a half
This checkin to GC51F07 Knapwell one and a half reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. 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 …
-
Found GC10ZT3 Off Yer Trolley! (Cambourne)
This checkin to GC10ZT3 Off Yer Trolley! (Cambourne) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. 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 …
-
Found GC8TNPE Incy Wincy
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!
-
[Bloganuary] Not The Lottery
You already know what I'd do if I won the lottery: the same things I do now, just with more of the ones that don't pay. But before we talk about that, let me talk introduce you to game that's much more-satisfying to play than the lottery.