Week 898

Week beginning Monday 30th March.

We all took some time off this week and tried to catch up with the things that tend to slip while we’re working full-time on a client engagement.

Having finished working on the GOV.UK Publishing project with dxw last week, this week was a break between projects before we started a new project at NHS Digital after the Easter bank holiday weekend.

Chris L was at the Albert Hall on Monday night and heard the GFR theme tune, “We Are the Battery Human” by Stornoway, being played live! ❤️

I moved our savings from Issue 9 of Aldermore Bank’s Easy-Access Business Savings Account to Issue 14 to obtain a fractionally better interest rate. I find the business practice of treating your existing customers less favourably than your new customers so annoying, but unfortunately it seems to be almost universal!

Chris R drafted a proposal for Nicola Moore who we met back in January to do some Jam engagement work on our behalf. Chris R is talking to her as I write this. She’s got a lot of connections in the music industry, so I’m excited to see where this goes.

I did a bunch of work on integrating Stripe Connect with Jam so we can make payments directly from our Stripe account to their Stripe account. This is in contrast to the current approach where the money has to go via our bank account and a bank transfer using Wise. It’s been a bit painful working out exactly how this should work, but it will have a number of advantages. This feature will be behind a user-specific feature flag to start with, because we need to do some testing in the live environment before making it more generally available.

While doing that work on Jam, I ran into problems with the solid_queue gem triggering a segmentation fault in the pg gem. There seem to be a bunch of problems like this relating to using the pg gem on MacOS on Apple Silicon, but the fix that seemed to work for me was to add gssencmode: disable to the database configuration in the Rails app.

On Thursday I visited a Serendipity Labs office near me to see whether they had either a 1-person private office or a co-working space suitable for remote pairing. Unfortunately they don’t currently have a 1-person office, but the co-working space is very quiet, so it might work. The manager also mentioned that The Quad in Cambridge does have 1-person offices available, so I might pursue that, although the location isn’t so good for me.

Until next time.

– James