I'm Dan Q (he/him). I've spent the last 26+ years creating and writing online.
I work as a software engineer, and I volunteer with Three Rings. I live with my partner, her husband, two kids and a dog. I can sometimes be found geo*ing, performing magic, or recording the most pointless podcast.
I believe in open source, open relationships, and opening doors to marginalised groups. Black lives matter. Trans
rights are human rights.
Be nice to humans, human.
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FlipFlop Solitaire's Deck-Generation Secret
I enjoy a mobile game called FlipFlop Solitaire, which provides a few thousand pre-seeded decks that are guaranteed "winnable". This blew my mind for a little while - how can you be sure that these shuffles are all winnable? But then I worked out a way to achieve exactly that result... by thinking in reverse! Read more →
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My Salary History
Inspired by Jeremy Keith doing the same, I've made the salary history of my career transparent. Read more →
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Chicory Keys
There's a special spot in my wallet where my "front door key" lives, but - despite the practical reasons to do so - I've resisted adding the Chicory House key in that spot. Instead, I've found myself keeping it in the "secondary key" spot, as a tiny reminder that the current state of affairs is a temporary one. Read more →
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Letting Games Die
Inspired by Mike Cook's argument that old video games should be allowed to die, I was inspired to jot down some of my own thoughts and experiences in the area of video game preservation. Read more →
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Wood-Fired
This year's 3Camp venue had a wood-fired pizza oven, so I signed-up for a shift of cooking for my fellow volunteers and thoroughly enjoyed making and baking a monumental amount of dough. Read more →
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Food divided by Distance
In the kind of dream that only happens when I'm ill, I invented an app that would track both your location and your food consumption, and report to social media your journey progress as a proportion of your remaining meal. Read more →
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Did I Cheat?
I solved a puzzle geocache in an unconventional way: by writing a program to permute all the possible solutions and check them for me. Was that cheating? I can see arguments either way... Read more →
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A Random List of Silly Things I Hate
Just a list of eleven random silly things that I hate, to various degrees. Read more →
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A Hundred Inconveniences
It's F-Day plus 31, and our flood-disrupted lives have become defined by the hundred or so daily inconveniences that are imposed by our accidentally-nomadic lifestyle. Here's hoping we can sort-out some more stable accommodation sometime soon! Read more →
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More articles →
(articles are traditional long-form blog posts) -
Reply to: I Wish I Could Talk to My Dad
Inspired by a mate whose dad recently died, Kev Quirk shared his own experience of his father's death, and a particular ritual of his reminded me of one of my own. Read more →
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There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻 × Read more →
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What breaks when one of your developers leaves?
On Friday, I said goodbye to a colleague as she left us after most of a decade with the company. Then this morning, all hell broke loose on some production servers.
It turns out that the API key that connected our application to our feature flag management platform was associated with her account, and hadn't shown up in the exit audit.
Let this be your reminder to go check where, if anywhere, your applications are using person-specific keys where they should be using generic ones! -
Found GCBN167 Ivy Believe It's Up There!
This afternoon I'm acting as backup driver for my partner Ruth, who's walking the length of the Thames Path by (very gradual) instalments. A delightful tree climb soon gave me this great cache container! Read more →
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Did not find GC3KQK2 RRR10
A little sad to DNF this cache which is probably just well-hidden, but I've only got limited time to hunt as I'm the backup driver for this segment of a walk down the entire length of the Thames Path. Read more →
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Finding the right Bottom Hole paper
Terence Eden takes us on a rabbithole of trying to work out what actual newspaper formed the basis of the newspaper prop in an episode of Bottom, and it makes an amusing ride-along. Read more →
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I took the dog out for a walk from the Chicory House yesterday. We found ourselves on a familiar-looking footpath: but Icouldn't place exactly why I'd been there before.
Fortunately, I maintain a personal tracklog of virtually everywhere I've been in the last decade or two, so I was able to pluck the relevant records right out of my own database.
Personal location tracking continues to be an awesome aides mémoire. It's hard to sell people on the idea, probably because it's a slow-burner - you need lots of data before it starts to pay off! - but I still recommend it. Read more → -
Today, for the first time ever, I reached the end of a roll if dental floss without first losing or giving up on it. Read more →
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As if I hadn't suffered enough "flood damage" this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup - hour the first time in months! - in our rental... by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱 Read more →
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Chicory, Coffee, and Code
Now that we've finished our move into the Chicory House, I have for the first time in over two months been able to set up my preferred coding environment... with a proper monitor on a proper desk with a proper office chair. Bliss!
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Good morning, Goldfinch
A goldfinch came to my bedroom window to say hi, this morning. Good morning, Goldfinch! × Read more →
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Unpacked Kitchen
Today's mission in what we're calling the Chicory House - our home while our actual house gets repaired - was to unpack the kitchen. I think it's looking pretty good!
(The cardboard box you can see contains pans we brought with us that turn out to be incompatible with the induction hobs at the Chicory House, boo!)
Next weekend's mission will be to set myself up a workspace that isn't the conservatory dining table. 😬 -
Reply to: Sent to Coventry: Who is Princess Victor Duleep Singh?
In a longer article about the less-known Duleep Singh princesses, my friend Sundeep argued that it was inappropriate to describe Irene's death as her "committing suicide" because it implies criminality. One rabbithole of the laws of four countries later, I argue a (pointless) counterpoint. Read more →
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100 Days to Offload × 7
I remain a huge fan of Kev Quirk's "100 Days To Offload" blogging challenge. And today... I just completed it for the seventh time!
Kev announced that he completed it again today, too. He uses a different metric to me - he counts "posts over a twelve month period", while I use a slightly more-restrictive subset of that: "posts in a calendar year", because it was easy for me to make a table out of in my blog stats.
After some discussion, Kev agreed that the earliest year I could claim for was 2020.
Personally, I feel like each of the hundred posts should occur on different days too. This is relevant to me, because sometimes I post multiple times in a day... but it's 100 days to offload, not 100 posts to offload, right?
Therefore, by my own restrictions... the soonest I could achieve the goal in a year would be the 100th day of the year. Right?
Which is today.
Which I just did. 🎉 Read more → -
The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.
Minas Karamanis has produced a fantastic article about his experience of the use of LLMs for research in physics, and the concerns that he has about its use by less-experienced researchers just beginning to find their way in the field. I echo his thoughts, from my own field of software engineering, and wonder... how will we allow junior developers to gain experience in a world that may encourage them to use LLMs rather than trying and failing for themselves? Read more →
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More posts →
(of all kinds:
articles, 
checkins, 
notes, 
reposts...)