Week 923

Another busy couple of weeks working on Mavis. School flu vaccination season is well under way, so we’re seeing increased usage of the system - and consequently more queries and performance issues to address. Our work to allow SAIS teams to run clinics as well as school sessions was covered in the i newspaper too.

We took a break from the project to meet some of our fellow CoTech members at the autumn gathering. The theme of the event was “AI, Communities & Coops”. There were some guest speakers, non-co-op folks and a bunch of representatives from various member co-ops. It was good to catch up with some old friends and hear how people are facing up to their changing work. For co-ops that are used to charging for their time the promise (whether realised or not) of a technology that allows you to do more work in the same amount of time creates a lot of difficulties, both internally and in conversations with clients.

On the whole I was a little surprised at how enthusiastically some co-ops have adopted the new “AI” technology. But knowing how thoughtful and honest our CoTech friends are I could see how much everyone was struggling with the new reality. I think the Communication Workers Union’s recent report AI Workers’ Inquiry 2026 reflects more closely what I am experiencing - this technology moves work around rather than reduces it, and has many negative externalities.

I’ve been enjoying watching some of Zig developer Andrew Kelley’s conference talks. He seems like a thoughtful and empathetic community leader unlike some of those we have to tolerate in the Ruby/Rails community. His talk Making Systems Programming Accessible put into words one of the many reasons I enjoy working with Chris and James - they are unafraid to delve deep into systems to try to understand the root cause of problems. For example James recently solved an issue with flaky tests by understanding what DatabaseCleaner was doing, how it interacted with ActiveRecord and why we’d introduced it in the first place. It was also a good reminder that I’m happy doing this too, and the more time I can carve out for deep work the more peaceful I am.

Have an excellent weekend, folks.

– Chris