Week 900

Week beginning Monday 13 April 2026.

900 weeks of Go Free Range! That’s a nice round number isn’t it. It also appears to be the number of weeks that Nirvana’s awesome MTV Unplugged album has spent in the top 40 of the Official Rock & Metal Albums Chart (via Forbes). We’re in good company.

NHS Vaccinations

We’ve been busy getting up to speed with the new Good Machine / Mavis project this week, including:

• Getting access to our nhs.net email accounts after quite a few phone calls to the support desk, which unblocked the rest of our onboarding process into the various NHS systems.
• Getting used to using Microsoft 365 for collaboration and Jira for project management.
• Meeting various people, including Mike Thompson who I know from our Headshift days many years ago.
• Learning about the development and deployment processes. There are quite formal approval processes in place before deployment which means it feels as though there’s quite a lot of work in progress (e.g. things waiting for testing/deployment vs things that being worked on for the following release).
• Continuing to investigate the performance improvements we were asked to look at last week. I don’t remember working on an app with such sensitive data before so we’re trying to work out how we can best reproduce the problem locally in order to allow us to test different approaches.
• Pairing with the existing developers.
• Learning a bit about Jujutsu which some of the developers are using as an alternative to git.

It’s a big project so there’s still a lot to learn but we’ve been made to feel very welcome by all of Good Machine and NHS colleagues and are enjoying getting stuck in.

Code Club

I resumed Code Club at my daughter’s school for the Summer term but with a few changes:

• restricted to year 4 and above
• a maximum of 12 children per session
• the same group for a half term at a time

It was mostly year 3 last term but they were lacking some basic computer skills that meant I was spending a lot of time with them and I felt that I was neglecting some of the older children. I had up to 16 children in a group last term but that was too many for both the space and my ability to give them any meaningful time. I asked parents to book their child into the session each week last term but after a while it was mostly the same faces so this just caused additional admin for me and the parents.

I intend to explore recruiting more volunteers so that we can increase the number of children involved and open it back up to year 3.

Nesta

Chris had another chat with Nesta during the week to discuss some possible future work on Visit a Heat Pump. We really enjoyed working on the project and are trying to work out whether it’s something we can get involved in again. I’m looking forward to it already!

Music conference

Chris had another meeting about the event being organised as part of the “Scaling cooperation: Working together for a fairer, more productive digital platform ecosystem in the new music economy” project that we mentioned in week 893. It’s scheduled to be a day of collaboration and networking focussed around building a world where musicians own and control the tools and spaces they need to thrive.

Jam

James has continued making progress on the Stripe Connect integration that we hope goes some/all of the way to reducing our potential risk when running such an online marketplace, and means that payments to artists are automatic and more frequent than our current manual monthly process.

Chris is continuing to work on improvements to the album creation page.

Human powered

James has added /ai and /human.json to state that we don’t use generative AI to author content for this website and to assert our authorship of the content. See James’s post about adding these pages on his own site for further information.

DataKind support

Chris has offered to help one of the DataKind organisers with some CSS queries they have.

That’s all for now.

Until next time.

– Chris