Take a look at the map below. I’m the pink pin here in Oxfordshire. The green pins are my immediate team – the people I work with on a
day-to-day basis – and the blue pins are people outside of my immediate team but in its parent team (Automattic’s org chart is a bit like a fractal).
I’m the pink pin; my immediate team are the green pins. People elsewhere in our parent team are the blue pins. Some pins represent multiple people.
Thinking about timezones, there are two big benefits to being where I am:
I’m in the median timezone, which makes times that are suitable-for-everybody pretty convenient for me (I have a lot of lunchtime/early-afternoon meetings where I get to
watch the sun rise and set, simultaneously, through my teammates’ windows).
I’m West of the mean timezone, which means that most of my immediate coworkers start their day before me so I’m unlikely to start my day blocked by anything I’m waiting on.
(Of course, this privilege is in itself a side-effect of living close to the meridian, whose arbitrary location owes a lot to British naval and political clout in the 19th century: had
France and Latin American countries gotten their way the prime median would have probably cut through the Atlantic or Pacific oceans.)
2. Language Privilege
English is Automattic’s first language (followed perhaps by PHP and Javascript!), not one of the 120 other languages spoken
by Automatticians. That’s somewhat a consequence of the first language of its founders and the language in which the keywords of most programming languages occur.
It’s also a side-effect of how widely English is spoken, which in comes from (a) British colonialism and (b) the USA using
Hollywood etc. to try to score a cultural victory.
Languages self-reportedly spoken by Automatticians, sized proportional to the number of speakers. No interpretation/filtering has been done, so you’ll see multiple dialects of the
same root language.
I’ve long been a fan of the concept of an international axillary language but I appreciate that’s an idealistic dream whose war
has probably already been lost.
For now, then, I benefit from being able to think, speak, and write in my first language all day, every day, and not have the experience of e.g. my two Indonesian colleagues who
routinely speak English to one another rather than their shared tongue, just for the benefit of the rest of us in the room!
3. Passport Privilege
Despite the efforts of my government these last few years to isolate us from the world stage, a British passport holds an incredible amount of power, ranking fifth or sixth in the world depending on whose passport index you
follow. Compared to many of my colleagues, I can enjoy visa-free and/or low-effort travel to a wider diversity of destinations.
Normally I might show you a map here, but everything’s a bit screwed by COVID-19, which still bars me from travelling to many
places around the globe, but as restrictions start to lift my team have begun talking about our next in-person meetup, something we haven’t done since I first started when I met up with my colleagues in Cape Town and got
assaulted by a penguin.
But even looking back to that trip, I recall the difficulties faced by colleagues who e.g. had to travel to a different country in order tom find an embassy just to apply for the visa
they’d eventually need to travel to the meetup destination. If you’re not a holder of a privileged passport, international travel can be a lot harder, and I’ve definitely taken that for
granted in the past.
I’m going to try to be more conscious of these privileges in my industry.
We’ve missed out on or delayed a number of trips and holidays over the last year and a half for, you know, pandemic-related reasons. So this summer, in addition to our trip to Lichfield, we arranged a series of back-to-back expeditions.
1. Alton Towers
The first leg of our holiday saw us spend a long weekend at Alton Towers, staying over at one of their themed hotels in between days at the water park and theme park:
The CBeebies Land hotel is… whimsical.
Yes, there’s a puppeteer (somewhere) in that cabinet processing checkins.
Even the elevators play tunes and put on a light show with every journey.
It took me a while to see this rabbit as playing music, rather than, y’know… vomiting.
The whimsy continues in the theming of the restaurant. Yes, that windmill turns.
Technically, this is part of one of the other (similarly whimsical) hotels on the site, but nobody seemed to mind our exploring.
On at least one occasion we ate dinner in “The Library”, which turns out (disappointingly) not to be a library but a room with pictures of books on the wall.
The hotel puts on a series of show somewhat reminiscent of an “upscale” Pontins.
Bing the rabbit made me glad that the other end of this hotel room had a bar.
The (Octonauts) theming of our hotel room even extended as far as the phone, TVs, and that notice they put up about towel washing. Neat.
Hole in… seven?
For obvious reasons, we don’t have photos inside the water park. Ignore the sign, we asked permission before taking this one!
Befriending wildfowl is what people with kids come to theme parks for, right?
Yay! Frog fountains!
The In The Night Garden Boat Ride was a particular favourite.
Social distancing was imposed reasonably wall, all things considered, although (as you’d expect) many fairgoers were less-disciplined than we’d have liked.
We spent a lot of our first day in the theme park in CBeebies Land, but we only had the patience to queue for the Octonauts rollercoaster the once.
CBeebies Land itself had a variety of shows with different characters.
Makaton for “friend” is just cute. Thanks, Mr. Tumble.
On these, among the hottest days of the year, we got quite sweaty inside our masks.
I’m not sure we optimised this photo opportunity for height.
An unrepentant nose-picker gets jail time in Mutinty Bay.
The Postman Pat ride designer had the foresight to provide two steering wheels in case the participants weren’t good at sharing… but still provided an odd number of buttons to use
to “deliver parcels” at key points during the ride.
Later in the first day and into the second day we stepped up to more-exciting family rides, like the Congo River Rapids, and even a few thrill rides that interested only a subset of
our party.
The Congo River Rapids had a tediously long queue (not least because no groups, however small, were allowed to share a boat), but at least we all got to take part together as a
family.
The kids had to make a solemn promise to stop their bickering before they were allowed to sit together for this ride.
Not everybody was equally-enthusiastic about haunted house shoot-’em-up ride Duel.
2. Darwin Forest
The second leg of our holiday took us to a log cabin in the Darwin Forest Country Park for a week:
We punctuated our journey from Alton Towers with a trip to Chatsworth House to feed some livestock.
Chatsworth House also has a spectacular adventure playground.
“I found a stick!” “That’s… half a tree!”
Eventually we reached our cabin, unpacked… and jumped into the hot tub!
For the duration of the week we instituted “holiday mornings”, permitting the children to get up by themselves, assemble their own breakfast, and watch broadcast TV… so long as they
did so without disturbing the adults. It worked pretty well.
The forest trails are full of obstacles fun for children… and adults.
This way up.
No, THIS way up!
Further along the trail, there’s a traverse wall.
Off the trails, all kinds of curious sculptures – like these fairy houses – can be found.
We forgot to bring a football, but we played lots of imaginary sports.
The on-site soft play centre operated at minimal capacity, which felt about right.
A soft play centre with a low population means you’re often alone on the racing slides…
…that is, unless you bring your own racers to compete with!
The second mini-golf course of our holiday was deceptively harder than the first thanks to awkwardly-shaped obstacles that reflected the ball out at terrible angles.
Ruth’s old secondary school is now an old folks home and an attached fancy tea room, so – as we were in the vicinity – we had to go visit!
Remarkably, the kids (for once) showed impeccable table manners.
I’m almost embarrassed to say that this, one of the best photos I’ve ever taken, was snapped accidentally when a 4-year-old reached over and touched my camera.
What else does one do in the Derbyshire Dales? That’s right: go down caves!
Staff at the Devil’s Arse were amazing and even took the kids on their own personal tour of a ropemaker’s hut (not part of the routine tour).
We also got to bring home a length of rope that the kids helped make.
It turns out to be hard to take a good photo down a cave. Can’t think why.
Our second spelunking expedition took us into Speedwell Cavern by boat.
The bottomless pit, behind us, turns out to be less-bottomless than advertised.
When it wasn’t raining, it was hot. Either way, we were on holiday, so ice cream was in order.
The kids shared a bedroom for pretty-much the first time since we moved house last year, and routinely sat up late reading stories to one another until they zonked out mid-book.
Naturally, I took one of our “chill out and rest” days as an excuse for a nice long hike and a geocaching expedition to the Sydnope Valley.
We also tried an local escape room and it was spectacularly well-designed (and amazingly family-friendly).
Oh, and there might have been a modicum of drinking, both in and out of the hot tub.
3. Preston
Kicking off the second week of our holiday, we crossed the Pennines to Preston to hang out with my family (with the exception of JTA,
who had work to do back in Oxfordshire that he needed to return to):
Our resident 4-year-old foodie claims that no crumpets are as good as Nanna Doreen’s “giant” ones.
Sometimes you just need an ice lolly and a bean bag to chill on. If you can’t find a bean bag, use Dan.
Now that she doesn’t have any cats, dogs, or chickens, my mother’s old sheds have been converted into playhouses.
Who needs a tickle? You need a tickle.
Fortunately, the felt-tips she found were of the washable variety.
Why yes, this is a picture of me taking a picture of Ruth taking a picture.
I’m not sure what this pose was MEANT to achieve…
…but what it ACTUALLY achieved was my mother getting ink splotches on her face.
Syncing everything up in anticipation of a Pokewalk.
“Which way to the Pokestop?” (I’m guessing. I don’t understand Pokemon Go.)
“How far to the Pokegym?” (I still don’t know anything about Pokemon Go. Don’t flame me.)
I feel like every time I visit my family I acquire a larger number of photos that I can’t begin to explain.
Like this one. Is this some kind of game? What are the rules? Who’s winning? I just don’t know.
Is this the same game? Are the children all on the same team (against Becky) or not? I have so many unanswered questions.
And this one. What are Sarah and I doing? Simultaneously cracking our necks, perhaps?
The kids put food out for the hedgehogs and attracted a big one.
Now THIS kind of GPS-based sport I can get behind. Lead on to the cache!
The kids were less impressed by this geocache than I was. And I wasn’t THAT impressed.
Not content with sprinting around the 400m track wearing her wellies, our 7-year-old then proceeded to dominate on the park gym.
If you pedal one of these things hard enough, does it take off?
Wheeee!
So. Many. Sprinkles.
How do they find so much energy?
We borrowed a dog from a family friend. If our 7-year-old had her way, we wouldn’t have given it back.
It was Jemma’s birthday, apparently, so we marked it at a family barbecue.
Nearby Brockholes nature reserve provided a wonderful outing.
This one’s the less-accident-prone of our children. Otherwise he’d probably already be in the water, somehow.
Our 7-year-old likes to befriend ducks wherever she goes.
Again with the boundless energy as the kids disappear into one of Brockholes’ meadows.
That boy loves a big open space to run in, for sure.
Brockholes’ adventure play area is pretty exciting too.
But crossing a wobbly bridge isn’t the easiest thing when you’re little.
Luckily our children are both pretty fearless and adventurous and will give pretty much anything a go.
It’s hard to tell, but he’s not shouting in distress here, but in joy.
I believe this is an English Longhorn, a traditional draft animal of North-West England in centuries past.
I made several attempts to get my mother, my sister Sarah, and both our kids into a single frame in which they were all looking at the camera and none of them were blinking. I
failed, but this was the closest I managed.
4. Forest of Bowland
Ruth and I then left the kids with my mother and sisters for a few days to take an “anniversary mini-break” of glamping in the gorgeous Forest of Bowland:
This caravan-sized wooden hut became our delightful little home for a few days.
Here, at the edge of the Forest, the Bier Beck snakes lazily towards the River Ribble.
The farm on which our pod was situated kept horses.
I just loved the fact that this horse had a zebra-print jacket.
One morning, we took a scorching hike up Pendle Hill. Didn’t see any witches, but also didn’t receive any mission from God, so I guess all’s well.
We DID get to meet Steve Taylor, though, who’s repeatedly climbing the hill, carrying a bathtub, until he’s ascended to the consecutive height of Mount Everest. He’s raising money
for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, the hero.
That pubs expanded their outdoor seating provision to handle social distancing works wonderfully when you get to sit in a gorgeous but quiet beer garden.
During a self-guided tour of the nearest village we bumped into the vicar who showed us his church’s pipe organ. Ruth tried to explain to me how (and why) this particular pipe organ
was unusual and cool, but I’m not sure I’ll ever “get it” as well as she does.
I found a second wind on a walk around Gisburn Forest and jogged up to the trail’s highest point, leaving Ruth far behind the sweaty mess ahead of her.
I’m not aware of any iron mining operations anywhere near this forest, but there must be iron oxide in the rocks to turn this stream so red.
Each evening we’d record a quick selfie video to say hi to the kids. Sometimes (with some help!) they’d send one back.
A particular treat was stargazing by the fire pit on an evening.
As we checked-out of our accommodation, Ruth suggested we see the sea (we’re a long way from it, normally), so we diverted via the coast.
The children, back in Preston, were apparently having a whale of a time:
Starfish-petting.
(Yes, actual starfish.)
That’ll be Seaworld, of course.
Tube. Tube tube tube.
Do you think the fish think that humans are the exhibit?
Both kids play with VR at home and are way less susceptible to VR-nausea than I am (even with all the practice I’ve had!).
Legoland Manchester. (Did you even know there was a Legoland in Manchester? I didn’t.)
The 4-year-old took “meeting” Lego Batman way more-seriously than the 7-year-old, I think.
That’s one small step for…. OW I STOOD ON A LEGO BRICK!
This brick was her contribution, I guess?
I think this must be Avenham Park in Preston.
Many of his paintings start out as beautiful coloured stripes and end up as brown handprints. I can’t imagine how.
“Do you do contactless?”
I gather the children even got a little gardening done… or at least, grazed on the entirety of my mother’s herb garden.
6. Suddenly, A Ping
The plan from this point was simple: Ruth and I would return to Preston for a few days, hang out with my family some more, and eventually make a leisurely return to Oxfordshire. But it
wasn’t to be…
Well that’s not the kind of message you want to get from your phone.
I got a “ping”. What that means is that my phone was in close proximity to somebody else’s phone on 29 August and that other person subsequently tested positive for COVID-19.
My risk from this contact is exceptionally low. There’s only one place that my phone was in close proximity to the phone of anybody else outside of my immediate family, that
day, and it’s when I left it in a locker at the swimming pool near our cabin in the Darwin Forest. Also, of course, I’d been double-jabbed for a month and a half and I’m more-cautious
than most about contact, distance, mask usage etc. But my family are, for their own (good) reasons, more-cautious still, so self-isolating at Preston didn’t look like a possibility for
us.
Ruth and I went directly to a drive-through PCR testing facility.
As soon as I got the notification we redirected to the nearest testing facility and both got swabs done. 8 days after possible exposure we ought to have a detectable viral
load, if we’ve been infected. But, of course, the tests take a day or so to process, so we still needed to do a socially-distanced pickup of the kids and all their stuff from Preston
and turn tail for Oxfordshire immediately, cutting our trip short.
The results would turn up negative, and subsequent tests would confirm that the “ping” was a false positive. And in an ironic twist, heading straight home actually put us
closer to an actual COVID case as Ruth’s brother Owen turned out to have contracted the bug at almost exactly the same time and had, while we’d been travelling down
the motorway, been working on isolating himself in an annex of the “North wing” of our house for the duration of his quarantine.
I set up a “yellow zone” between Owen’s quarantine area and the rest of the house into which we could throw supplies. And I figured I’d have fun with the signage.
7. Ruth & JTA go to Berwick
Thanks to negative tests and quick action in quarantining Owen, Ruth and JTA were still able to undertake the next part of this three-week holiday period and take
their anniversary break (which technically should be later in the year, but who knows what the situation will be by then?) to Berwick-upon-Tweed. That’s their story to tell, if
they want to, but the kids and I had fun in their absence:
Silly Hat Morning!
Swan boat ride. (I had to do all the pedalling, but the kids were good at shouting orders and threatening to fire upon or board the other boats!)
A trip to Woburn Safari Park isn’t complete without a photo of a monkey on the roof of a car.
That giant tortoise was determined that it could open the (latched) gate if only it pushed hard enough.
Kids love a kid (goat).
Nothing beats a picnic lunch right as everybody else rushes to queue for food in the heat.
Ever the culinary experimenter, our 4-year-old tries pouring a Fruit Shoot onto some candy floss.
And of course, some geocaching might have happened.
“The cache is this way!” “No, it’s THIS way.” “Kids! It’s still 200 metres away, keep walking!”
GC98N1P – whose cache container is this aeroplane and is hidden in a “crash site”! – is one of my favourite local caches.
I gave the 7-year-old a kazoo. #parentingmistakes
We start with nice colourful lines…
…and end up with brown hands! It’s part of his artistic process, I guess.
We enjoyed a socially-distanced visit from Robin one breakfast time.
We also extended our practice in programming with Scratch.
I found an opportunity to retrieve a much-loved but no-longer-sustainable geocache of my own. Look at this monster!
I tapped into my Lancashire heritage and had a go at making “butter pie”, a regional dish distinct to (pretty much) just Preston and Chorley.
This one turned out pretty well, but I’ve still got ideas about how I’ll improve for the next one.
8. Reunited again
Finally, Ruth and JTA returned from their mini-break and we got to do a few things together as a family again before our extended holiday drew to a close:
The children were glad to see mummy and daddy return.
Also, to explain everything that’d they been up to. (Possibly just as a ruse to keep from being sent to bed for a moment longer!)
I specifically said, “Look like you’re NOT completely lost in this maize maze,” I swear.
I feel like I’ve played a lot of crazy golf these last few weeks. This course was perhaps the second-craziest.
There was some kind of puzzle to solve in a maze. Then you had to dig in the sand to find a token of the right colour and put it in a box to show you’d solved it. I don’t know.
I’m not sure this angle of approach is going to end well.
Nice horse.
Den-building? Or poster art for some gritty new Netflix series?
“I’m being a bat.” She hung there for some time, greeting other children as they entered her “cave”.
“Smile!” “Wait… what’s in your mou-?” [click]
Gooseberry-picking.
The gooseberries later made a great reduction to go on our Sunday brunch pancakes. Except for all the ones the kids ate before then.
Choosing exactly the right strawberry requires significant mental effort.
You need to check the fruit from every side before picking it.
This one failed quality control.
We got to go to Liz & Simon’s barbecue party and it was awesome to catch up with everybody.
Plus there are a few new faces in our friend group who I hadn’t had a chance to meet before.
Making (and re-making) friends is so much easier as a child.
For us adults, though, sharing food and alcohol goes a long way.
“It’s smokey over here.” “By the barbecue, yes.” “Why?”
It’s amazing how a toy designed for somebody WAY younger than you is fascinating if it’s just different enough from one you have at home. Novelty wins.
She came here to kick ass at Pokemon and eat your burgers. And you’re all out of burgers.
The fruits we picked earlier in the week made a great addition to a cake.
Of course, we were SUPPOSED to be at Fairport’s Cropredy Convention this weekend, until it was cancelled for the second year in a row. But we still enjoyed Fairport’s livestream
mini-concert.
We adults felt too old and/or self-conscious to dance in our living room, but the kids had no such limitations.
By the end of the virtual concert we were all ready to flump into bed.
We built an enclosure for a new pet we’re expecting in the coming week (the kids’ first pet; let’s see how that goes…).
Robin (and Owen – now recovered but not featured in this picture) – were instrumental in helping us run some ropes over a high bough of one of our garden’s trees…
…to facilitate the installation of a wonderful new ‘nest swing’ Ruth had bought the kids but that they’d not really been able to use until now.
9. Back to work?
Tomorrow I’m back at work, and after 23 days “off” I’m honestly not sure I remember what I do for a living any more. Something to do with the Internet, right? Maybe ecommerce?
I’m sure it’ll all come right back to me, at least by the time I’ve read through all the messages and notifications that doubtless await me (I’ve been especially good at the discipline,
this break, of not looking at work notifications while I’ve been on holiday; I’m pretty proud of myself.)
But looking back, it’s been a hell of a three weeks. After a year and a half of being pretty-well confined to one place, doing a “grand tour” of so many destinations as a family and
getting to do so many new and exciting things has made the break feel even longer than it was. It seems like it must have been months since I last had a Zoom meeting with a
work colleague!
For now, though, it’s time to try to get the old brain back into work mode and get back to making the Web a better place!
We took a family trip up to Lichfield this weekend. I don’t know if I can give a “review” of a city-break as a whole, but if I can: I give you five stars, Lichfield.
It’s got a cathedral, which is quite pretty.
Maybe it’s just because we’ve none of us had a night away from The Green… pretty-much since we moved
in, last year. But there was something magical about doing things reminiscent of the “old normal”.
“I’m so excited! We get to stay… at a Premier Inn!” At first I rolled my eyes at this joyous line from our 4-year-old (I mean… it’s just a Premier Inn…), but it did feel good
to go somewhere and do something.
It’s not that like wasn’t plenty of mask-wearing and social distancing and hand sanitiser and everything that we’ve gotten used to now: there certainly was. The magic, though, came from
getting to do an expedition further away from home than we’re used to. And, perhaps, with that happening to coincide with glorious weather and fun times.
Socially-distanced balloon modelling turns out to work, not least because you can hand one of those long balloons to somebody without getting anywhere near them.
We spent an unimaginably hot summer’s day watching an outdoor interpretation of Peter and the Wolf, which
each of the little ones has learned about in reasonable depth, at some point or another, as part of the (fantastic) “Monkey Music” classes
of which they’re now both graduates.
So long as you weren’t staring at the painted circles on the grass – for corralling families apart from one another – you’d easily forget how unusual things are, right now.
And maybe it’s that they’ve been out-of-action for so long and are only just beginning to once again ramp up… or maybe I’ve just forgotten what the hospitality industry is like?… but
man, we felt well-looked after.
From the staff at the hotel who despite the clear challenges of running
their establishment under the necessary restrictions still went the extra mile to make the kids feel special to the restaurant we went to
that pulled out all the stops to give us all a great evening, I basically came out of the thing with the impression of Lichfield as a really nice place.
Take social distancing to the next level: do your urban geocaching at the crack of dawn.
I’m not saying that it was perfect. A combination of the intolerable heat (or else the desiccating effect of the air conditioner) and a mattress that sagged with two adults on it meant
that I didn’t sleep much on Saturday night (although that did mean I could get up at 5am forageocachingexpeditionaroundthecity before it got too hot later on). And an
hour and a half of driving to get to a place where you’re going to see a one-hour show feels long, especially in this age where I don’t really travel anywhere, ever.
But that’s not the point.
The buffet was closed, of course, but these kids were made for an “all you can eat” breakfast.
The point is that Lichfield made me happy, this weekend. And I don’t know how much of that is that it’s just a nice place and how much is that I’ve missed going anywhere or doing
anything, but either way, it lead to a delightful weekend.
Over the last six years I’ve been on a handful of geohashing expeditions, setting out to functionally-random GPS coordinates to see if I can get there, and documenting what I find when I do. The comic that inspired the
sport was already six years old by the time I embarked on my first outing, and I’m far from the most-active member
of the ‘hasher community, but I’ve a certain closeness to them as a result of my work to resurrect and host the “official” website. Either way: I love the sport.
I even managed to drag-along Ruth and Annabel to a hashpoint (2014-04-21 51 -1) once.
But even when I’ve not been ‘hashing, it occurs to me that I’ve been tracking my location a lot. Three mechanisms in particular dominate:
Google’s somewhat-invasive monitoring of my phones’ locations (which can be exported via Google Takeout)
My personal GPSr logs (I carry the device moderately often, and it provides excellent precision)
The personal μlogger server I’ve been running for the last few years (it’s like Google’s system, but – y’know –
self-hosted, tweakable, and less-creepy)
If I could mine all of that data, I might be able to answer the question… have I ever have accidentally visited a geohashpoint?
Let’s find out.
There’s a lot to my process, but it’s technically quite simple.
Data mining my own movements
To begin with, I needed to get all of my data into μLogger. The Android app syncs to it automatically and uploading from my GPSr was
simple. The data from Google Takeout was a little harder.
I found a setting in Google Takeout to export past location data in KML, rather than JSON, format. KML is understood by GPSBabel which
can convert it into GPX. I can “cut up” the resulting GPX file using a little grep-fu (relevant xkcd?) to get month-long files and import them into
μLogger. Easy!
It’s slightly hidden, but Google Takeout choose your geoposition output format (from a limited selection).
Well.. μLogger’s web interface sometimes times-out if you upload enormous files like a whole month of Google Takeout logs. So instead I wrote a Nokogiri script to convert the GPX into SQL
to inject directly into μLogger’s database.
Next, I got a set of hashpoint offsets. I only had personal positional data going back to around 2010, so I didn’t need to accommodate for the pre-2008 absence of the 30W time zone rule. I’ve had only one trip to the Southern hemisphere in that period, and I
checked that manually. A little rounding and grouping in SQL gave me each graticule I’d been in on every date.
Unsurprisingly, I spend most of my time in the 51 -1 graticule. Adding (or subtracting, for the Western
hemisphere) the offset provided the coordinates for each graticule that I visited for the date that I was in that graticule. Nice.
Preloading the offsets into a temporary table made light work of listing all the hashpoints in all the graticules I’d visited, by date. Note that some dates (e.g. 2011-08-04, above)
saw me visit multiple graticules.
The correct way to find the proximity of my positions to each geohashpoint is, of course, to use WGS84. That’s an
easy thing to do if you’re using a database that supports it. My database… doesn’t. So I just used Pythagoras’ theorem to find positions I’d visited that were within 0.15° of a that
day’s hashpoint.
Using Pythagoras for geopositional geometry is, of course, wrong. Why? Because the physical length of a “degree” varies dependent on latitude, and – more importantly – a degree of
latitude is not the same distance as a degree of longitude. The ratio varies by latitude: only an idealised equatorial graticule would be square!
But for this case, I don’t care: the data’s going to be fuzzy and require some interpretation anyway. Not least because Google’s positioning has the tendency to, for example, spot a
passing train’s WiFi and assume I’ve briefly teleported to Euston Station, which is apparently where Google thinks that hotspot “lives”.
I overlaid randomly-selected Google My Location and GPSr routes to ensure that they coincided, as an accuracy-test. It’s interesting to
note that my GPSr points cluster when I was moving slower, suggesting it polls on a timer. Conversely Google’s points cluster
when I was using data (can you see the bit where I used a chat app), suggesting that Google Location Services ramps up the accuracy and poll frequency when you’re actively
using your device.
I assumed that my algorithm would detect all of my actual geohash finds, and yes: all of these appeared as-expected in my results. This was a good confirmation that my approach
worked.
And, crucially: about a dozen additional candidate points showed up in my search. Most of these – listed at the end of this post – were 50m+ away from the hashpoint and
involved me driving or cycling past on a nearby road… but one hashpoint stuck out.
Hashing by accident
We all had our roles to play in our trip to Edinburgh. Tom… was our pack mule.
In August 2015 we took a trip up to Edinburgh to see a play of Ruth‘s brother Robin‘s. I don’t remember
much about the play because I was on keeping-the-toddler-entertained duty and so had to excuse myself pretty early on. After the play we drove South, dropping Tom off at Lanark station.
We exited Lanark via the Hyndford Bridge… which is – according to the map – tantalisingly-close to the 2015-08-22 55 -3
hashpoint: only about 23 metres away!
Google puts the centre of the road I drove down only 23m from the 2015-08-22 55 -3 hashpoint (of course, I was actually driving on the near side of the road and may have been closer
still).
That doesn’t feel quite close enough to justify retroactively claiming the geohash, tempting though it would be to use it as a vehicle to my easy geohash ribbon. Google doesn’t provide error bars for their exported location data so I can’t draw a circle of uncertainty,
but it seems unlikely that I passed through this very close hashpoint.
Pity. But a fun exercise. This was the nearest of my near misses, but plenty more turned up in my search, too:
2013-09-28 54 -2 (9,000m)
Near a campsite on the River Eden. I drove past on the M6 with Ruth on the way to Loch Lomond for a mini-break to celebrate our sixth anniversary. I was never more than 9,000 metres
from the hashpoint, but Google clearly had a moment when it couldn’t get good satellite signal and tries to trilaterate my position from cell masts and coincidentally guessed, for a
few seconds, that I was much closer. There are a few such erroneous points in my data but they’re pretty obvious and easy to spot, so my manual filtering process caught them.
2019-09-13 52 -0 (719m)
A600, near Cardington Airstrip, south of Bedford. I drove past on the A421 on my way to Three Rings‘ “GDPR Camp”, which was more fun than it sounds, I promise.
2014-03-29 53 -1 (630m)
Spen Farm, near Bramham Interchange on the A1(M). I drove past while heading to the Nightline Association Conference to talk about Three Rings. Curiously, I came much closer to the hashpoint the previous week when I drove a neighbouring road on my way to York for my friend
Matt’s wedding.
2020-05-06 51 -1 (346m)
Inside Kidlington Police Station! Short of getting arrested, I can’t imagine how I’d easily have gotten to this one, but it’s moot anyway because I didn’t try! I’d taken the day off
work to help with child-wrangling (as our normal childcare provisions had been scrambled by COVID-19), and at some point during the day we took a walk and came somewhat near to the
hashpoint.
2016-02-05 51 -1 (340m)
Garden of a house on The Moors, Kidlington. I drove past (twice) on my way to and from the kids’ old nursery. Bonus fact: the house directly opposite the one whose garden contained
the hashpoint is a house that I looked at buying (and visited), once, but didn’t think it was worth the asking price.
2017-08-30 51 -1 (318m)
St. Frieswide Farm, between Oxford and Kidlington. I cycled past on Banbury Road twice – once on my way to and once on my way from work.
2015-01-25 51 -1 (314m)
Templar Road, Cutteslowe, Oxford. I’ve cycled and driven along this road many times, but on the day in question the closest I came was cycling past on nearby Banbury Road while on the
way to work.
2018-01-28 51 -1 (198m)
Stratfield Brake, Kidlington. I took our youngest by bike trailer this morning to his Monkey Music class: normally at this point in history Ruth would have been the one to take him,
but she had a work-related event that she couldn’t miss in the morning. I cycled right by the entrance to this nature reserve: it could have been an ideal location for a geohash!
2014-01-24 51 -1 (114m)
On the Marston Cyclepath. I used to cycle along this route on the way to and from work most days back when I lived in Marston, but by 2014 I lived in Kidlington and so I’d only cycle
past the end of it. So it was that I cycled past the Linacre College of the path, around 114m away from the hashpoint, on this day.
2015-06-10 51 -1 (112m)
Meadow near Peartree Interchange, Oxford. I stopped at the filling station on the opposite side of the roundabout, presumably to refuel a car.
2020-02-27 51 -1 (70m)
This was a genuine attempt at a hashpoint that I failed to reach and was so sad about that I never bothered to finish writing up. The hashpoint was very close (but just out of sight
of, it turns out) a geocache I’d hidden in the vicinity, and I was hopeful that I might be able to score the most-epic/demonstrable déjà vu/hash collision
achievement ever, not least because I had pre-existing video evidence that I’d been at the
coordinates before! Unfortunately it wasn’t to be: I had inadequate footwear for the heavy rains that had fallen in the days that preceded the expedition and I was in a hurry to get
home, get changed, and go catch a train to go and see the Goo Goo Dolls in concert. So I gave up and quit the expedition. This turned out to be the right decision: going to
the concert one of the last “normal” activities I got to do before the COVID-19 lockdown made everybody’s lives weird.
2014-05-23 51 -1 (61m)
White Way, Kidlington, near the Bicester Road to Green Road footpath. I passed close by while cycling to work, but I’ve since walked through this hashpoint many times: it’s on a route
that our eldest sometimes used to take when walking home from her school! With the exception only of the very-near-miss in Lanark, this was my nearest “near miss”.
No silly grin, but coincidentally – perhaps by accident – I took a picture out of the car window shortly after we passed the hashpoint. This is what Lanark looks like when you drive
through it in the rain.
Since I reported last summer that I’d accepted a job offer with Automattic I’ve
been writing about my experience of joining and working with Automattic on a nice, round 128-day schedule.
My first post covered the first 128 days: starting from the day I decided (after 15 years of
watching-from-afar) that I should apply to work there through to 51 days before my start date. It described my recruitment process, which is famously comprehensive and intensive. For me
this alone was hugely broadening! My first post spanned the period up until I started getting access to Automattic’s internal systems, a month and a half before my start date. If you’re
interested in my experience of recruitment at Automattic, you should go and read that post. This post, though, focusses on my induction,
onboarding, and work during my first two months.
I could possibly do with a little more desk space, or at least a little better desk arrangement, after the house move.
With a month to go before I started, I thought it time to start setting up my new “office” for my teleworking. Automattic offered to buy me a new desk and chair, but I’m not ready to
take them up on that yet: but I’m waiting until after my (hopefully-)upcoming house move so I know how much space I’ve got to work with/what I need! There’s still plenty for a new
developer to do, though: plugging in and testing my new laptop, monitor, and accessories, and doing all of the opinionated tweaks that make one’s digital environment one’s own –
preferred text editor, browser, plugins, shell, tab width, mouse sensitivity, cursor blink rate… important stuff like that.
For me, this was the cause of the first of many learning experiences, because nowadays I’m working on a MacBook! Automattic doesn’t
require you to use a Mac, but a large proportion of the company does and I figured that learning to use a Mac effectively would be easier than learning my new codebase on a
different architecture than most of my colleagues.
Working on location, showing some Automattic pride. You can’t really make out my WordPress “Christmas jumper”, hanging on the back of the sofa, but I promise that’s what it is.
I’ve owned a couple of Intel Macs (and a couple of Hackintoshes) but I’ve never gotten on with them well enough to warrant
becoming an advanced user, until now. I’ll probably write in the future about my experience of making serious use of a Mac after a history of mostly *nix and Windows machines.
Automattic also encouraged me to kit myself up with a stack of freebies to show off my affiliation, so I’ve got a wardrobe-load of new t-shirts and stickers too. It’s hard to argue that
we’re a company and not a cult when we’re all dressed alike, and that’s not even mentioning a colleague of mine with two WordPress-related tattoos, but there we have it.
Totally not a cult. Now let me have another swig of Kool-Aid…
Role and Company
I should take a moment to say what I do. The very simple version, which I came up with to very briefly describe my new job to JTA‘s mother, is: I write software that powers an online shop that sells software that powers online shops.
It’s eCommerce all the way down. Thanks, Xzibit.
You want the long version? I’m a Code Magician (you may say it’s a silly job title,
I say it’s beautiful… but I don’t necessarily disagree that it’s silly too) with Team Alpha at Automattic. We’re the engineering team behind WooCommerce.com, which provides downloads of the Web’s most-popular eCommerce platform… plus hundreds of
free and premium extensions.
There’s a lot of stuff I’d love to tell you about my role and my new employer, but there’s enough to say here about my induction so I’ll be saving following topics for a future
post:
Chaos: how Automattic produces order out of entropy, seemingly against all odds,
Transparency and communication: what it’s like to work in an environment of radical communication and a focus on transparency,
People and culture: my co-workers, our distributed team, and what is lost by not being able to “meet around the coffee machine” (and how we work to artificially
recreate that kind of experience),
Distributed working: this is my second foray into a nearly-100% remote-working environment; how’s it different to before?
To be continued, then.
I’m not the only member of my family to benefit from a free t-shirt.
Onboarding (days 1 through 12)
I wasn’t sure how my onboarding at Automattic could compare to that which I got when I started at the Bodleian. There, my then-line manager Alison‘s obsession with preparation had me arrive to a
thoroughly-planned breakdown of everything I needed to know and everybody I needed to meet over the course of my first few weeks. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it
leaves little breathing room in an already intense period!
What it felt like to receive an induction from the first boss I had at the Bod.
By comparison, my induction at Automattic was far more self-guided: each day in my first fortnight saw me tackling an agenda of things to work on and – in a pleasing touch I’ve seen
nowhere else – a list of expectations resulting from that day. Defined expectations day-by-day are an especially good as a tool for gauging one’s progress and it’s a nice touch that
I’ll be adapting should I ever have to write another induction plan for a somebody else.
Both an agenda and a list of expectations for the day? That’s awesome and intimidating in equal measure.
Skipping the usual induction topics of where the fire escapes and toilets are (it’s your house; you tell us!), how to dial an outside line (yeah, we don’t really do that here),
what to do to get a key to the bike shed and so on saves time, of course! But it also removes an avenue for more-casual interpersonal contact (“So how long’ve you been working here?”)
and ad-hoc learning (“So I use that login on this system, right?”). Automattic’s aware of this and has an entire culture about making information accessible, but it
takes additional work on the part of a new hire to proactively seek out the answers they need, when they need them: searching the relevant resources, or else finding out who to ask… and
being sure to check their timezone before expecting an immediate response.
Onboarding at Automattic is necessarily at least somewhat self-driven, and it’s clear in hindsight that the recruitment process is geared towards selection of individuals who can work
in this way because it’s an essential part of how we work in general. I appreciated the freedom to carve my own path as I learned the ropes, but it took me a little while to
get over my initial intimidation about pinging a stranger to ask for a video/voice chat to talk through something!
Meetup (days 14 through 21)
How cool is South African currency? This note’s got a lion on it!
I’d tried to arrange my migration to Automattic to occur just before their 2019 Grand Meetup, when virtually the entire company gets together in one place for an infrequent but important gathering, but I couldn’t make it work and just barely missed it. Luckily, though, my team had
planned a smaller get-together in South Africa which coincided with my second/third week, so I jetted off to get some
facetime with my colleagues.
When they say that Automatticians can work from anywhere, there might nonetheless be practical limits.
My colleague and fellow newbie Berislav‘s contract started a few hours after he landed in Cape Town, and it was helpful to my
journey to see how far I’d come over the last fortnight through his eyes! He was, after all, on the same adventure as me, only a couple of weeks behind, and it was reassuring
to see that I’d already learned so much as well as to be able to join in with helping him get up-to-speed, too.
The meetup wasn’t all work. I also got to meet penguins and get attacked by one of the little buggers.
By the time I left the meetup I’d learned as much again as I had in the two weeks prior about my new role and my place in the team. I’d also
learned that I’m pretty terrible at surfing, but luckily that’s not among the skills I have to master in order to become a valuable
developer to Automattic.
Happiness Rotation (days 23 through 35)
A quirk of Automattic – and indeed something that attracted me to them, philosophically – is that everybody spends two weeks early in their first year and a week in every subsequent
year working on the Happiness Team. Happiness at Automattic is what almost any other company would call “tech support”, because Automattic’s full of job titles and team names that are,
frankly, a bit silly flipping awesome. I like this “Happiness Rotation” as a concept because it keeps the entire company focussed on customer issues and the things that
really matter at the coal face. It also fosters a broader understanding of our products and how they’re used in the real world, which is particularly valuable to us developers who can
otherwise sometimes forget that the things we produce have to be usable by real people with real needs!
Once I’d gotten the hang of answering tickets I got to try my hand at Live Chat, which was a whole new level of terrifying.
One of the things that made my Happiness Rotation the hardest was also one of the things that made it the most-rewarding: that I didn’t really know most of the products I was
supporting! This was a valuable experience because I was able to learn as-I-went-along, working alongside my (amazingly supportive and understanding) Happiness Team co-workers: the
people who do this stuff all the time. But simultaneously, it was immensely challenging! My background in WordPress in general, plenty of tech support practice at Three Rings, and even my experience of email support at Samaritans put me in a strong position in-general…
but I found that I could very-quickly find myself out of my depth when helping somebody with the nitty-gritty of a problem with a specific WooCommerce extension.
Portering and getting DRI (days 60 through 67)
I’ve also had the opportunity during my brief time so far with Automattic to take on a few extra responsibilities within my team. My team rotates weekly responsibility for what they
call the Porter role. The Porter is responsible for triaging pull requests and monitoring blocking issues and acting as a first point-of-call to stakeholders: you know, the
stuff that’s important for developer velocity but that few developers want to do all the time. Starting to find my feet in my team by now, I made it my mission during my first
shift as Porter to get my team to experiment with an approach for keeping momentum on long-running issues, with moderate success (as a proper continuous-integration shop, velocity is
important and measurable). It’s pleased me so far to feel like I’m part of a team where my opinion matters, even though I’m “the new guy”.
“Here, I found these things we need to be working on.” Pretty much how I see the Porter role.
I also took on my first project as a Directly Responsible Individual, which is our fancy term for the person who makes sure the project runs to schedule, reports on progress etc.
Because Automattic more strongly than any other place I’ve ever worked subscribes to a dogfooding strategy, the
woocommerce.com online store for which I share responsibility runs on – you guessed it – WooCommerce! And so the first project for which I’m directly responsible is the upgrade of woocommerce.com to the latest version of
WooCommerce, which went into beta last month. Fingers crossed for a smooth deployment.
There’s so much I’d love to say about Automattic’s culture, approach to development, people, products, philosophy, and creed, but that’ll
have to wait for another time. For now, suffice to say that I’m enjoying this exciting and challenging new environment and I’m looking forward to reporting on them in another 128 days
or so.
An easy find while out for a walk an the waterfront with some of my fellow Team Alpha Automatticians. Beautiful view and we got the best possible weather too. TFTC!
This adventure took a lot of planning. It’s 350 miles from where I live to Glasgow. I have a Honda CG 125cc, and my maximum range in one day is around 200 miles – if I have the full
day for travelling, which I wouldn’t have, most days. I figured if I was going to have a road trip, I’d have to make stop offs at various parts of the UK, to break it up. This
actually worked out really well, as there are lots of parts of the UK that I wanted to visit.
…
After booking the series of hotel rooms, I started to think about the actual riding. It was two weeks before the trip. I didn’t have enough thermals, or a bike suit that was
protective enough. I also didn’t have a way of storing luggage on my bike, or keeping it dry (and two laptops would be in the bags). There was also an issue with the chain on my
bike that needed fixing. Not exactly a trivial to do list! So the next two weeks turned into a bit of an eBay and Amazon frenzy, with a trip down to see my dad in Kent to get the
bike chain fixed, and rummage around for my old waterproofs in my grandparent’s attic. It was pretty close: the final item arrived the day before the trip. I got ridiculously lucky
on eBay with my new, more visible, better padded, comfy bike suit though, which I love to bits. In hindsight, more time for all of this would have been helpful!
…
My friend Bev wrote about their motorcycling adventure up and down the UK; it’s pretty awesome.
