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…
Week 915 Week beginning Monday, 27th July 2026. Chris Roos has been on holiday this week. James and I have mostly been working on our project with the NHS. NHS Vaccinations (Mavis) The features we are currently working on allow School Aged Immunisation Services (SAIS) teams to set up and invite patients to clinics. These clinics can be run outside of a school and have their own mechanisms for…
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…
Week 912 Week beginning Monday, 6th July 2026. We welcomed James back on Tuesday after he found some (hopefully long-lasting) relief from tooth pain. NHS Vaccinations (Mavis) I finished up some changes to the way we process uploads of immunisation records. Previous performance issues and worries about race conditions mean we were relying on sidekiq-throttled to ensure we only processed one of this…
Week 911 Week beginning Monday, 29th June 2026. My week has again been plagued by tooth pain and interspersed with trips to the dentist 🦷. Thanks to Chris L and Chris R for holding the fort in the meantime. 🏰 NHS Vaccinations (Mavis) 💉 Chris L has been focussing on reducing the scope of the locking we when importing vaccination records from a CSV file with the ambition to reduce the average…
Week 910 Week beginning Monday, 22nd June 2026. I was out for a chunk of the week due to tooth pain, but Chris L & Chris R continued to work on performance-related improvements for the Mavis project for NHS Digital . Chris L identified a small change to a gnarly SQL query used to search for patients which led to a significant improvement in performance. Chris R shipped a change to use Sidekiq Pro…
Week 909 Week beginning Monday, 15th June 2026. We’ve continued to work on performance-related improvements for the Mavis project for NHS Digital . The service is expecting an increased amount of traffic and data volumes and it’s important that we give everyone confidence that the system will continue to work as intended. We have a performance environment available to do some load tests but…
Week 908 Week beginning Monday, 8th June 2026. We’ve continued to work on performance-related improvements for the Mavis project for NHS Digital . It’s been a bit of a slog of late, but I think we’re getting there! During our work on the proejct I discovered a new-to-me feature of git which allowed me to add a commit note trailer to a series of commits using a command like this . The development…
Week 907 907 is the number of weeks GFR has existed and the area code of Alaska . Coincidence!? The early heatwave has passed and my office has dropped back to a pleasant temperature after becoming a sauna for a week or so. Chris and I were both off on Monday but we were back in action alongside James from Tuesday continuing to work on Mavis . We managed to deploy the work we’ve been doing over…
Week 906 This was another short week due to the late May bank holiday. James returned from his travels to the Isles of Scilly while Chris headed off to the Wye valley for a week with the family. It’s half term so I’ve only worked part time while juggling childcare. James and I have continued working on the performance improvements that Chris and I started last week. We’re working to break apart…