Week 918 & 919

Weeks beginning Monday, 17th and Monday, 24th August 2026.

The last few weeks have been a bit of a blur for me. We’ve been thin on the ground at times due to the school holiday effect with both Chris L and Chris R being variously away on holiday or having child-care commitments. I’ve had intermittent dental pain and lots of disruption from building work, culminating in a new water supply connection where the contractors managed to split the 80+ year-old cast iron-water main outside my house!

NHS Vaccinations (Mavis) 💉

We’ve continue our work on the project modulo interruptions due to the events mentioned above.

Last Wednesday, Good Machine hosted a product showcase at The Ministry in Borough for functionality built over the last year. Chris L did a demo of the clinic booking functionality he and I have been working on.

And then on Thursday, Chris L & Chris R attended an in-person Mavis strategy session, also at The Ministry. In these days of extensive remote working, it’s always nice to meet up with colleagues in person, so I was sorry I wasn’t able to attend.

Jam 🍓

We’re very happy to welcome Kordel Records, a sub-label of the magnificent Seil Records. The label’s owner, Boris, was a very early supporter and friend to the project, so it’s great to finally have enough functionality in place to showcase this wonderful music. Check out Kordel Records and support Jam, the label and four wonderful ambient artists by buying one of their releases.

Both Chris L and I have been doing bits and bobs of work on Jam, although it’s been difficult to find sustained chunks of time to work on the project. Chris added a bunch of admin pages using Avo. Having configured a bank feed in FreeAgent ¹ for our Jam Stripe account, I wrote up some detailed intructions on how to explain the transactions. I then added an admin purchases page to Jam and enhanced it to help supply some of the required figures.

Developer Environment 💻

I’ve been fiddling with my development environment. I’ve ditched oh-my-zsh, because I was hardly using any of it or its plugins and my shell was taking a long time to load. I’ve hand-crafted a .zshrc to reproduce all the behaviour I wanted. I briefly flirted with the starship prompt before settling on the pure prompt which is pretty minimalistic and makes any calls to git asynchronously. I’ve also switched from MacOS Terminal.app to ghostty.

Having abandoned managing my dot files using Nix some time ago, I’ve been quite pleased with the new approach I’ve been using. I have a bare git repo at $HOME/.dotfiles and a dotfiles alias that sets this as the git directory and $HOME as the working directory. Simple but effective!

Until next time

– James