Dan Q
This checkin to GC9XDZ7 het kinderbadje reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
At the end of a work trip to Amsterdam, came out this morning to find a few geocaches before catching the train back home. Thanks for the history lesson! SL, TFTC.
This checkin to GC9MY4J IJtunnel reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
My work team and I have been meeting in Amsterdam, but this is our “afternoon off” so we’re going to the maritime museum. I’m not convinced that the person I found was particularly beautiful, but I appreciated the hint anyway! Dragged one of my teammates along. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK (and around the world!).
This checkin to GCADM5E Rembrandt park #2 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
On my way out for pizza with my work colleagues, a quick and easy find in the first place I looked. SL, TFTC!
This checkin to GCA7Q4A Elephant Parade reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Big thanks to the cache owner for their note, letting me know that the cache location is still accessible. Somehow I’d not seen the obvious route. Followed a family of ducks and soon found the cache location. So excited I could jump for joy.
FP awarded in part for the lovely cache but mostly for the attentive CO who posted a note so promptly. TFTC!
This checkin to GCA1JJ5 Gemaal Mercatorstraat reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
My work colleagues from around the world have gathered for a meeting at a hotel near here. I woke a little early this morning and so I decided to come out and try to find a couple of geocaches before our team meeting starts.
After failing to find nearby GCA7Q4A “Elephant Parade” owing to construction work, I was hopeful of a find here. The coordinates put me exactly on top of a likely hiding place, and with a little exploration (and some pretending to tie my shoes!) I had the cache in my hand. SL, TFTC.
Listened for water pumping but couldn’t hear any over the traffic noise, I’m afraid! Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK.
I’m in Amsterdam for a meetup for my new team at Automattic.
When we’ve not been out tackling escape rooms, finding geocaches, and eating curry, we’ve been doing a variety of activities to help solidify our new team’s goals, priorities, and expertise: y’know, the normal things you might expect on a company away week.
I volunteered to lead the initial session on our first day with a couple of icebreaker games, which went well enough that I’m inclined to share them here in case they’re of any use to you. The games we played are called Heraldry and Compairs. Let’s take a look:
I was looking at the coat of arms of Noord Holland, the province in which Amsterdam lies, and thinking about all the symbolism and propaganda that’s encoded into traditional heraldry, and how much effort it takes to decode it… unless you just, y’know, guess!
I asked each participant to divide a shield into five quadrants and draw their own coats of arms, featuring aspects of (a) their work life, (b) their personal life, (c) something they value, (d) something they’re good at, and (e) something surprising or unusual. I really wanted to keep the time pressure on and not allow anybody to overthink things, so I set a 5-minute timer from the moment everybody had finished drawing their shield outline.
Then, everybody passed their drawing to the right, and each person in turn tried, as best they could, to introduce the person to their left by attempting to interpret their neighbour’s drawing. The known categories helped to make it easier by helping people latch onto something to start talking about, but also more-challenging as people second-guessed themselves (“no, wait, maybe it’s sailing you’re good at and guitar you play in your personal life?”).
After each introduction is made, the person being introduced gets to explain their heraldry for themselves, congratulating their introducer on the things they got right and their close-guesses along the way.
It’s sort-of halfway between “introduce your neighbour” and “pictionary”. And it worked well to get us warmed-up, feeling a little silly, knowing one another slightly better, and in a space in which everybody had been expected to have spoken and to have made a harmless mistake (everybody managed to partially-interpret a shield correctly). A useful place to be at the end of an icebreaker exercise is left with the reminder that we are, after all, only human.
Next up, we played a game only slightly inspired by witnessing a game of Mr and Mrs the other week3. I threw together a Perchance (which, in the nature of such things, is entirely open-source and you’re welcome to adapt it for your own use) that generated a series of randomly-selected pairs of teammates and asked a question to differentiate the two of them.
Participants other than the two shown on the screen were challenged to guess the answer to the question. Sometimes the questions would have a definitive answer, and sometimes not: the joy was in the speculation! “Hmm, I know that Dan’s done quite a bit of globetrotting… but could he actually have travelled further East than a colleague who lives much further East than him?”
After a few seconds to a minute, once their colleagues had settled on an answer, the people listed on the question were encouraged to make their own guesses. Usually they’ll have a better idea as they are one of the data points, but that’s not always true!
There’s no points, and you can play for as long as you like so long as it’s long enough that everybody gets at least one turn, so it’s a good “fill the rest of the time slot” game. It follows Heraldry moderately well as an icebreaker double-feature because the former is firstly about learning things about one another (and to a lesser extent guessing), and the latter is about the opposite.
I came out of both games knowing more about the humans behind the screens in my new team, and it seemed to open up the room for some good discussions afterwards, so the social lubricant effect was clearly effective too. If you give them a go or adapt them into anything else, let me know!
1 Our absent colleague instead had to tower over us on an enormous projector screen.
2 The red (“gules”) upright (“rampant”) lion in the coat of arms possibly comes from the heraldry of the city of Gelderen in Germany, but once part of the Dutch Republic. The lions striding (“passant”) to the left (“to dexter”) but turning to face you (“guardant”) come from the arms of Fryslân (Friesland), and its rectangles represent the districts of Fryslân. Aren’t you glad you asked.
3 Also known as The Newlyweds Game after the US game show of that name and basically the same format, Mr and Mrs is a game in which a (typically newly) married couple are asked questions about one another and their lives together which they answer separately and then those answers are compared. This induces a reaction of compersion when they’re “right” and in-sync and when the couple disagree it results in amusement. Or possibly divorce.
This checkin to GCA7Q4A Elephant Parade reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Finding the elephant and the numbers was easy.
But some construction is happening at the GZ and I couldn’t see a safe/permitted way to get close. 😢
This checkin to GCADMXH Rembrandt park #3 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I’ve recently changed team at work, so my new team and I have gotten together – from the UK, France, Poland, India and South Africa – here in Amsterdam to meet up in person and do some work “together” for a change: normally we work entirely distributed. After our day of work we did an escape room together, then on our way to dinner I dragged them out of their way a bit to find this geocache.
Quick easy find, TFTC! Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK (and from many other corners of the world, courtesy of Team Desire from Automattic!).
This checkin to GC7B9CP Platform 9 3/4 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Even on a Monday morning the muggles are lining up to hold the trolley. Not me. As an actual magician, I’ve no need for such frivolities. Instead, as I’m passing anyway on my way to a train to an entirely different magical land (The Netherlands), I just snapped a selfie with the sign visible in the background. Easy peasy. TFTC.
This checkin to GC1TK6P Narrow Minded reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
QEF while out hunting for some breakfast this morning between trains on my journey from Oxford to Amsterdam for a work meetup. Lovely thematic cache container in a great spot. FP awarded. TFTC.
Hey, this is my 100th post of 2024!1
1 This being my 100th post relies on you using non-pedant counting, that is: allowing “checkins” like this to count as fully-fledged blog posts. There’s more thought given to this question in my blog post about Kev Quirk’s #100DaysToOffload challenge, but the short answer seems to be that the challenge’s creator would count this as my 100th post of the year, so perhaps you should too. If you don’t, though, then I’ve so-far published 74 posts this year and – thanks to Bloganuary and a general renewed focus on blogging I’m probably still on-track to make 100. And if I remember to do so I’ll post a footnote for you pedants when I do.
During a family holiday last week to the Three Valleys region of the French Alps for some skiing1, I came to see that I enjoy a privilege I call the freedom of the mountain.
The freedom of the mountain is a privilege that comes from having the level of experience necessary to take on virtually any run a resort has to offer. It provides a handful of benefits denied to less-confident skiers:
The downside is that I’m less well-equipped to consider the needs of others! Out skiing with Ruth one morning I suggested a route back into town that “felt easy” based on my previous runs, only to have her tell me that – according to the map – it probably wasn’t!
The kids spent the week in lessons. It’s paying off: they’re both improving fast, and the eldest has got all the essentials down and it’s working on improving her parallel turns and on “reading the mountain”. It’s absolutely possible that the eldest, and perhaps both of them, will be a better skier than me someday2.
Maybe, as part of my effort to do what I’m bad at, I should have another go at learning to snowboard. I always found snowboarding frustrating because everything I needed to re-learn was something that I could already do much better and easier on skis. But perhaps if I can reframe that frustration through the lens of learning itself as the destination, I might be in a better place. One to consider for next time I hit the piste.
1 Also a little geocaching and some mountainside Where’s Wally?
2 Assuming snow is still a thing in ten years time.
This checkin to GCADXC6 Tour de France reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
My very first “ski-o-cache” was 9 years ago, down in La Tania: this was my second! Found the host easily at the coordinates and found the cache in the third hiding place I tried. It’s quite stiff and hard to extract right now! Needed to wait to return it while some other skiers took pictures of one another at the GZ, but got there in the end. Salutations d’Oxford, en Angleterre. MPLC!
This post1 is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024.2Today’s prompt is:
Think back on your most memorable road trip.
It didn’t take me long to choose a most-memorable road trip, but first: here’s a trio of runners-up that I considered3:
At somewhere between 500 and 600 road miles each way, perhaps the single longest road journey I’ve ever made without an overnight break was to attend a wedding.
The wedding was of my friends Kit and Fi, and took place a long, long way up into Scotland. At the time I (and a few other wedding guests) lived on the West coast of Wales. The journey options between the two might be characterised as follows:
Guess which approach this idiot went for?
Despite having just graduated, I was still living very-much on a student-grade budget. I wasn’t confident that we could afford both the travel to and from the wedding and more than a single night’s accommodation at the other end.
But there were four of us who wanted to attend: me, my partner Claire, and our friends Bryn and Paul. Two of the four were qualified to drive and could be insured on Claire’s car8. This provided an opportunity: we’d make the entire 11-or-so-hour journey by car, with a pair of people sleeping in the back while the other pair drove or navigated!
It was long, and it was arduous, but we chatted and we sang and we saw a frankly ludicrous amount of the A9 trunk road and we made it to and from what was a wonderful wedding on our shoestring budget. It’s almost a shame that the party was so good that the memories of the road trip itself pale, or else this might be a better anecdote! But altogether, entirely a worthwhile, if crazy, exercise.
1 Participating in Bloganuary has now put me into my fifth-longest “daily streak” of blog posts! C-c-c-combo continues!
2 Also, wow: thanks to staying up late with my friend John drinking and mucking about with the baby grand piano in the lobby of the hotel we’re staying at, I might be first to publish a post for today’s Bloganuary!
3 Strangely, all three of the four journeys I’ve considered seem to involve Scotland. Which I suppose shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given its distance from many of the other places I’ve lived and of course its size (and sometimes-sparse road network).
4 Okay, probably not for the entire journey, but I’m certain it must’ve felt like it.
5 Our cargo included several cats who almost-immediately escaped from their cardboard enclosures and vomited throughout the vehicle.
6 This included, for example, our beds: we spent our first night in our new house camped together in sleeping bags on the floor of what would later become my bedroom, which only added to the sense of adventure in the whole enterprise.
7 It was, fortunately, only a light vehicle, plus our designated driver was at this point so pumped-up on energy drinks he might have been able to lift it by himself!
8 It wasn’t a big car, and in hindsight cramming four people into it for such a long journey might not have been the most-comfortable choice!
There are video games that I’ve spent many years playing (sometimes on-and-off) before finally beating them for the first time. I spent three years playing Dune II before I finally beat it as every house. It took twice that to reach the end of Ultima Underworld II. But today, I can add a new contender1 to that list.
Today, over thirty-five years after I first played it, I finally completed Wonder Boy.
My first experience of the game, in the 1980s, was on a coin-op machine where I’d discovered I could get away with trading the 20p piece I’d been given by my parents to use as a deposit on a locker that week for two games on the machine. I wasn’t very good at it, but something about the cutesy graphics and catchy chip-tune music grabbed my attention and it became my favourite arcade game.
I played it once or twice more when I found it in arcades, as an older child. I played various console ports of it and found them disappointing. I tried it a couple of times in MAME. But I didn’t really put any effort into it until a hotel we stayed at during a family holiday to Paris in October had a bank of free-to-play arcade machines rigged with Pandora’s Box clones so they could be used to play a few thousand different arcade classics. Including Wonder Boy.
Off the back of all the fun the kids had, it’s perhaps no surprise that I arranged for a similar machine to be delivered to us as a gift “to the family”2 this Christmas.
And so my interest in the game was awakened and I threw easily a hundred pounds worth of free-play games of Wonder Boy3 over the last few days. Until…
…today, I finally defeated the seventh ogre4, saved the kingdom, etc. It was a hell of a battle. I can’t count how many times I pressed the “insert coin” button on that final section, how many little axes I’d throw into the beast’s head while dodging his fireballs, etc.
So yeah, that’s done, now. I guess I can get back to finishing Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, the 2017 remake of a 1989 game I adored!5 It’s aged amazingly well!
1 This may be the final record for time spent playing a video game before beating it, unless someday I ever achieve a (non-cheating) NetHack ascension.
2 The kids have had plenty of enjoyment out of it so far, but their time on the machine is somewhat eclipsed by Owen playing Street Fighter II Turbo and Streets of Rage on it and, of course, by my rediscovered obsession with Wonder Boy.
3 The arcade cabinet still hasn’t quite paid for itself in tenpences-saved, despite my grinding of Wonder Boy. Yet.
4 I took to calling the end-of-world bosses “ogres” when my friends and I swapped tips for the game back in the late 80s, and I refuse to learn any different name for them.[footnote], saved Tina[footnote]Apparently the love interest has a name. Who knew?
5 I completed the original Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap on a Sega Master System borrowed from my friend Daniel back in around 1990, so it’s not a contender for the list either.
My second day of the main conference part of WordCamp Europe 2023 was hampered slightly by a late start on my part.
Still, I managed to get to all the things I’d earmarked for my attention, including:
I’m sure I can’t be the only person who’s been asked “why can’t the (or ‘shouldn’t the’) WordPress post editor let multiple people edit post at the same time”. Often, people will compare it to e.g. Google Docs.
Dawid summarised the challenging issues in any effort to implement this much-desired feature. Some of them are examples of those unsolved problems that keep rearing their heads in computer science, like the two generals’ problem, but even the solvable problems are difficult: How does one handle asynchronous (non-idempotent) commutative operations? How is the order of disparate actions determined? Which node is the source of truth? If a server is used, where is that server (with a nod to quite how awful the experience of implementing a Websockets server in PHP can be…)? And so on…
I really appreciated Dawid’s reference to the various bits of academic literature that’s appeared over the last four decades (!) about how these problems might be solved. It’s a strong reminder that these things we take for granted in live-updating multi-user web applications are not trivial and every question you can answer raises more questions.
There’s some great early proof-of-concepts, so we’re “getting there”, and it’s an exciting time. Personally, I love the idea of the benefits this could provide for offline editing (perhaps just because I’m still a huge fan of a well-made PWA!).
James Giroux’s goal: that we all become more curious about and more invested in our team’s experiences, from a humanistic standpoint. His experience of companies with organic growth of software companies is very, very familiar: you make a thing and give it away, then you need more people, then you’ve somehow got a company and it’s all because you just had an idea once. Sounds like Three Rings!
James was particularly keen to share with us the results of his Team Experience Index research, and I agree that some of the result are especially exciting, in particularly the willingness of underrepresented groups, especially women, to enagage with the survey: this provides hugely valuable data about the health of teams working in the WordPress space.
“We have this project that we work with and contribute to, that we love,” says James, in an attempt to explain the highly-positive feedback that his survey respondents gave when asked questions about the authenticity of their purpose and satisfaction in their role.
So, what do we do with these findings? How do WordPress-ey companies improve? James recommends that we:
Good tips, there.
A WordCamp tradition is to try to squeeze every willing participant into a photo. Clearly with the size that these events are, nowadays, this requires some wrangling (and, in this case, the photographers standing atop the roof of a nearby building to get everybody into frame).
I’ll have to keep an eye out for the final picture and see if I can find myself in it.
I always find that learning about bleeding edge CSS techniques makes me feel excited and optimistic, perhaps because CSS lends itself so well towards a progressive enhancement approach to development: often, you can start using a new technique today and it’ll only benefit, say, people using a beta version of a particular browser (and perhaps only if they opt-in to the applicable feature flag). But if you’ve designed your site right then the lack of this feature won’t impact anybody else, and eventually the feature will (hopefully) trickle-down into almost everybody’s Web experience.
Anyway, that’s what Fellyph Cintra says too, but he adds that possibly we’ve still not grown out of thinking that browsers take a long time between versions. 5 years passed between the release of Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7, for example! But nowadays most browsers are evergreen with releases each month! (Assuming we quietly ignore that Apple don’t sent new versions of Safari to old verisons of MacOS, continuing to exacerbate a problem that we used to see with Internet Explorer on Windows, ahem.)
<dialog> to his team and they responded with skepticism that they’d be able to use it within the next 5 years. But in fact
it’s already stable in every major browser.
An important new development may come from Baseline, a project to establish a metric of what you can reliably use on the Web today. So a bit like Can I Use, I guess, but taken from the opposite direction: starting from the browsers and listing the features, rather than the other way around.
Anyway, Fellyph went on to share some exciting new ideas that we should be using, like:
object-fit and object-position, which can make the contents of any container “act like” a background
aspect-ratio, which I’m already using and I love, but I enjoyed how Fellyph suggested combining the two to crop images to a fluid container on the client side
scroll-behavior: smooth, which I’ve used before; it’s pretty good
clamp, which I use… but I’m still not sure I fully grok it: I always have to load some documentation with examples when I use it
@container queries, which can apply e.g. (max-width: ...) rules to things other than the viewport, which I’ve not found a need for yet but I can see the
value of it
@layers, which grant an additional level of importance in the cascade: for example, you might load a framework into a layer (with @import url(...)
layer(framework)) which is defined as a lower-priority than your override layer, meaning you won’t have to start slapping !important all over the shop
@media (400px <= width <= 600px)-style media queries, which are much easier to understand than min-width: if you’re used to thinking in a
more-procedural programming language (I assume they work in container queries too!)
It’s also worth remembering:
@supports, which is badass and I love and use it already (it was especially useful as display: grid began to roll out and I wanted to start using it but
needed to use a fallback method for browsers that didn’t support it yet
:has(), which I’ve long thought is game-changing: styling something based on what it contains is magical; not really suitable for mainstream use yet without
Firefox support, though (it’s still behind a feature flag)! Fellyph sold me on the benefit of :not(:has(...)), though!
animation-timeline: and
animation-range: to specify that it’s the scroll position within the document that provides the timeline for the animation
And keeping an eye on upcoming things like text-balanced (which I’m already excited by), popover, selectmenu, view transitions (which I’ve been
experimenting with because they’re cool), and scoped style.
Fellyph was at least as inspiring as I’d hoped.
For my second workshop, I joined Google’s Adam Silverstein to watch him dissect a few participants’ websites performance using Core Web Vitals as a metric. I think I already know the basics of Core Web Vitals, but when it comes to improving my score (especially on work-related sites with unpleasant reliance on heavyweight frameworks like React, in my experience).
We talked a lot about render blocking (thanks to JS and CSS in the
<head>), thread blocking (by scripts, especially those reacting to user input), TTFB (relating to actual network
and server performance, or at least server-side processing), TBT (the time between FCP and TTI), and the upcoming change to measure INP rather than FID. That’s a lot of acronyms.
The short of it is that there are three pillars to Core Web Vitals: loading (how long until the page renders), interactivity (how long until the page responds to user interaction), and stability (how long it takes for the page to cease layout shifts as a result of post-load scripts and stylesheets). I was pleased that Adam acknowledged the major limitation of lab testing resulting from developers often using superior hardware and Internet connections to typical users, and how if you’re serious about performance metrics you’ll want to collect RUM data.
I came away with a few personalised tips, but they’re not much use for your site: I paid attention to the things that’ll be helpful for the sites I look after. But I’ll be taking note of his test pages so I can play with some of the tools he demonstrated later on.
I couldn’t liveblog this because I spent too much of the session applauding. A few highlights from memory:
Here’s looking forward to WordCamp Europe 2024 in Turin!