Week 913

Week beginning Monday, 13th July 2026.

NHS Vaccinations (Mavis)

James and I have spent a chunk of the week pairing (remotely). I’ve enjoyed it a lot and it’s especially useful given we’re tackling new (to us) functionality. We’ve been working on a feature for a pilot of vaccination clinics. In this pilot teams will be able to use Mavis to manage vaccination sessions in non-school settings, and in particular parents/carers of young people will be able to book vaccination sessions directly using a link to a form. We’ve been working on a feature that allows teams to modify some of properties of these appointments if they need changing for any reason.

Mavis adheres to a similar design philosophy as GOV.UK and as such reduces the number of questions asked of a user on each page. This means that changes to a model are accumulated over a number of “steps” of the process. Mavis uses the wicked gem to handle these kind of wizard-like interfaces.

Meanwhile Chris has been tackling a particularly complicated bug, helping out with the weekly release process and reviewing PRs.

Other stuff

I had a fun chat today with Finn from grass-roots events listing site gel. We’re thinking of a simple way to integrate jam with gel so that an artists upcoming gigs could be shown on their jam artist page and their releases could be shown on their gel page. We captured some ideas in a github issue.

I also spent a bit of time quantifying how much money we spend each year on “big tech” (Google, Microsoft and Amazon AWS in our case). We’ve discussed this a lot recently and would ideally like to shift our spending away from the tech giants and towards more sustainable, even co-operative alternatives. As with most projects, the first step was a spreadsheet.

Mocha turned 20 this week. Congratulations James and Mocha!

– Chris