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."
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).
#note #threeRings #volunteering #laptop #computers #work #automattic #employment #devcamp #hackathon
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!
Fabulous. I might wall-mount it.
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.
I've collated all of my liveblogging about #internationalVolunteerDay into a blog post about what #volunteering for #ThreeRings today was like for me.
Oh, and I recorded a scrappy podcast episode to go with it!
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).
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!
#note #internationalVolunteerDay #volunteering #threeRings #userInterface
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.
#note #internationalVolunteerDay #volunteering #threeRings #email #php #programming #wordpress #slack
My Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day isn't all technical work. It's also time to process the incoming postal mail.
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.
#note #internationalVolunteerDay #volunteering #threeRings #money
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.
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.
#note #internationalVolunteerDay #volunteering #threeRings #devops #logrotate #security #backups
Not every code review is fireworks, but most Three Rings changes come from the actual needs of the voluntary organisations that Three Rings supports. Some of our users were confused by the way the Admin > Roles page was laid out, so one of our volunteers wrote an improved version.
And because we're all about collaboration, discussion, learning from one another, and volunteer-empowerment... I've added a minor suggestion... but approved their change "with or without" it. I trust my fellow volunteer to either accept my suggestion (if it's right), reject it (if it's wrong), or solicit more reviews or bring it to Slack or our fortnightly dev meeting (if it requires discussion).
#note #internationalVolunteerDay #volunteering #threeRings #programming #github #code
Good news! It turns out that the new code to fix the mail merge fields in Three Rings doesn't introduce an inconsistency with established behaviour. It was important to check, but it turns out all is well.
I touched bases with a fellow volunteer on Slack. Three Rings volunteers primarily communicate via Slack: it helps us to work asynchronously, which supports the fact that our volunteers all have different schedules and preferences. Some might do a couple of evenings a week, others might do the odd weekend, others still might do an occasional intense solid week of volunteering with us and then nothing for months! A communication model that works both synchronously and asynchronously is really important to make that volunteering model work, and Slack fits the bill.
We get together in person sometimes, and we meet on Zoom from time to time too, but Slack is king of communication at Three Rings
#note #internationalVolunteerDay #volunteering #threeRings #programming #slack
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!
#note #internationalVolunteerDay #volunteering #threeRings #programming #github #debugging #git
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.
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.
#note #internationalVolunteerDay #volunteering #threeRings #sabbatical
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.
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."
#introduction, because I didn't really do one first time around. I'm on a #selfhosted instance so... feel free to #SayHi, or boost to introduce me to your friends (it's lonely on a server by yourself!).
#Queer #polyamourous #geek. Too late to be a renaissance man and not smart enough to be a polymath, I have to content myself with being a jack-of-all trades. #Blogger for ~25 years (https://danq.me), casual #fediverse user since 2018. #IndieWeb fan since forever.
European in exile living in West #Oxfordshire, #UnitedKingdom, with my partner @fleeblewidget, her husband @misterjta, our two children, and a derpy #dog. Politically #environmentalist #socialist.
Work for #Automattic since 2019: I love that I get paid to help contribute #softwareDevelopment to some of my favourite #OpenSource tools! Founded and #volunteer with a #NonProfit called #ThreeRings, producing software to help streamline charities.
When I've time for fun, I'm into #geohashing, #geocaching, #cycling, and performing #magic. Sometimes at the same time.
He/him pronouns.
