Tag: volunteering
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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."
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Top of a simple wooden bench; an attached brass plaque on the front side can be seen, but is illegible from this angle. But on the top, somebody has carved "Jane an amazing human."
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Found GC1DH2A Knipe Scar - Haweswater View
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.
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A Surprisingly Shit Bathroom
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.
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Found GC1DH7W Knipe Scar - On the Edge
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 if volunteer work, writing software to help charities. Beautiful view from the summit this evening! SL, TNLN, TFTC!
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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).
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Black Macbook Pro whose screen shows a locally-hosted copy of the Three Rings web application, overlaid with a terminal running lazygit.
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Sabbatical Lesson #2: Burnout
The second lesson I took from my sabbatical was that it's possible to risk burnout (and therefore, it's important to be aware of and ready to counteract it) even when you're not working (in the conventional sense). Fortunately, my coach is on hand to help.
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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.
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Dan holding a plate containing his name and a collection of compliments, listed in the full post.
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!Fabulous. I might wall-mount it.
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Just visited the Logos Hope, an ocean-going, volunteer-staffed floating book fair (run by a Christian charity, but it's not-TOO-religiousy inside, if that's not your jam) that's coincidentally docked for a fortnight right next door to my hotel on Trinidad!
What a strange concept. Fun diversion though.
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White and blue passenger ship docked alongside a building whose roof reads 'Welcome to Port of Spain'.
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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.
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Cardboard box containing many hundreds of sealed Christmas-card-sized envelopes.
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Moving Three Rings' Servers
Yesterday I achieved one of my primary sabbatical goals and moved Three Rings' primary servers to a new datacentre and a new architecture. But while the visible part happened yesterday, the whole thing's been months in the making and builds upon the effort of an entire team of dedicated volunteers.
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International Volunteer Day
It's International Volunteer Day, and thanks to being on sabbatical I got to spend most of the day volunteering with Three Rings. I liveblogged everything I got up to in a series of notes to try to shine a light on what volunteering (in a developer/devops role) with Three Rings can look like; this post is a summary of all that liveblogging, plus a few extra thoughts.
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For my final bit of Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day, I'm working on improving the UI of a new upcoming feature: a spreadsheet-like page that makes it easy for administrators to edit the details of many volunteers simultaneously (all backed by the usual level of customisation and view/edit permissions that Three Rings is known for).
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Screenshot showing a web page, 'Three Rings Directory - Edit All': a spreadsheet-like view of multiple volunteers, some of whom have had personal details like First Name, Address, or Telephone changed, resulting in these being highlighted and a prompt appearing to allow the changes to be saved/committed.
It's a moderately-popular request, and I can see it being helpful to volunteer coordinators at many different types of voluntary organisation.
Don't have time to write up the test instructions today, though, because I've got to wrap up my volunteering and go do some childwrangling, so that'll do for now!
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Even when it's technical, not all of my International Volunteer Day work for Three Rings has been spent using our key technologies (LNMR [Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, Ruby] stacks).
Today, I wrote some extra PHP for our WordPress-powered contact form to notify our Support Team volunteers via Slack when messages are sent. We already aim to respond to every message within 24 hours, 365 days a year, and are often faster than that... but this might help us to be even more-responsive to the needs of the charities who we help look after.
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A filled contact form alongside a Slack message and a resulting ticketing system message.
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My Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day isn't all technical work. It's also time to process the incoming postal mail.
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In front of a letterbox, an hand holds an open envelope and a (censored) Danske Bank cheque for £219.
Our time as volunteers may be free, but our servers aren't, so the larger and richer charities that use our services help contribute to our hosting costs. Most send money digitally, but some use dual-signatory accounts that require they send cheques.
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As well as the programming tasks I'm working on for Three Rings this International Volunteer Day, I'm also doing a little devops. We've got a new server architecture rolling out next week, and I'm tasked with ensuring that the logging on them meets our security standards.
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Terminal screenshot showing a directory listing of a logs directory with several gzipped logfiles with different date-stamped suffixes, and the contents of the logrotate configuration file that produced them.
Each server's on-device logs are retained in date-stamped files for 14 days, but they're also backed-up offsite daily.
Those bits all seem to be working, so next I need to work out a way to add a notification to our monitoring platform if any server doesn't successfully push a log to the offsite backup in a timely manner.