Week 917

Week beginning Monday, 10th August 2026.

Chris L has been away all week and Chris R was off on Thursday & Friday.🌴

I feel very guilty, because I failed to write notes for weeks 914 & 916 - sorry!😱

I hope everyone enjoyed watching the partial solar eclipse on Wednesday ☀️. I managed to observe it with a shonky homemade pinhole camera from Ditton Meadows in Cambridge 😎.

I’ve had a recurrence of a tooth problem which has meant it’s been hard to concentrate at times due to the pain 🦷. However, I’m hopefully going to get it sorted next Friday.🤞 My house is also still a building site with no functioning kitchen which is becoming very wearing ⚒️. However, work on that should be unblocked when I get a new connection to the water main in about 10 days time.🚰

Our focus has continued to be on the NHS Vaccinations project (Mavis). Over the last few weeks, Chris L & I have mostly been working on functionality to allow nurses to manage appointments in clinics as opposed to the sessions that the School Age Immunisation Service teams run in schools. 💉

We’re using step-by-step wizards which make use of Wicked and a session-backed ActiveModel class. I’m a bit nervous about the increasing complexity of one of the wizards - it feels all too easy to add extra state to the model. It reminds me a bit of how React components can quickly get out of hand complexity-wise for similar reasons. 🧙

I paired with Chris R earlier in the week while investigating and fixing a somewhat gnarly bug in the aforementioned wizard 🍐. Chris R has otherwise been doing a lot of thorough pull request reviews as well as pairing with one of the other developers on a large-scale refactoring to increase parallelization in processing CSV uploads.

I’ve spent a chunk of time today trying to fill in a form to renew some of our company insurance policies. It’s been pretty hard-going, not least because the form is a Word Document with funky formatting that I can’t seem to edit in Google Docs or Pages. 😔

In between times over the last couple of weeks, I’ve done a bunch of work on Jam 🍓. This has mostly been adding protection against malicious file uploads. However, I also managed to address some user feedback on uploading FLAC files with metadata. Chris L also made a first attempt at reducing the volume of traffic Jam receives from the AI bots!🤖

Anyway, that’s all I can think of for now. I hope you’re all managing to stay cool in the latest UK heatwave! 🫠

Until next time

– James