Week 903

A slightly shorter working week this week as we took Monday off for the early May bank holiday.

NHS Vaccinations

We continued our work with Good Machine on the Manage Vaccinations in Schools project (Mavis). We met up at the Good Machine office for the day on Wednesday and enjoyed pairing in person.

The scope of our work to improve the performance of Mavis and getting it ready to handle national-scale volumes of data and traffic is becoming clearer. We had some good planning and brainstorming sessions this week. James and I continued to add some observability (logging to Grafana via Cloudwatch) of key data import journeys while Chris was refactoring some of the import code with the view to making horizontal scaling easier.

We were disappointed to learn about the move to close the source code of many NHS repos including those we are working on.

At Go Free Range we strongly believe in working in the open - among very many other good reasons it gives visibility to the tax payer of how their money is being spent.

We’re proud to be a worker-owned, British technology company working for the public across the public sector. In an era where huge contracts awarded to consultancy companies and US defence contractors make it hard to see what value tax payers are receiving and where their money is going, we’re happy that anyone can see what we’re working on and how we work. We joined over 1,000 others in signing an open letter asking for the decision to be reconsidered.

Other news

James and I took some time out on Thursday to help get the vote out for our respective local Green Party candidates.

James took the time to port our gfr.coop URL shortening service from an AWS “serverless” setup into the Rails app that powers this site.

We spent today catching up on (life and work) admin and doing a little bit of work on jam.coop.