Week 924

Week beginning Monday, 28th September 2026.

NHS Vaccinations (Mavis) 💉

We’ve all had our heads down working on the NHS Manage Vaccinations in Schools project this week. As Chris L mentioned last week, the system has seen increased load with School Age Immunisation Service (SAIS) teams starting their school vaccination programmes for the new academic year. Chris L & Chris R have been continuing to diagnose and fix a number of bugs. I’ve been continuing to work on a feature to allow SAIS teams to add & edit their clinic locations themselves; this is currently a task that has to be done by the Ops team.

I’ve been enjoying working with govuk-components, govuk-form-builder & nhsuk-frontend which we’re using to implement the NHS Design System - it’s very satisfying to slot the different components together and quickly produce a very professional-looking page.

And I’m slowly getting my head around wicked which is used extensively in the app to build multi-page wizards. Many of these wizards work with a session-backed ActiveModel until the final confirmation step where they write everything to the database. The wizards often have a lot of state associated with them which can make them quite complex beasts. I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently working out the best way to structure them and write specs for them.

Worker Co-operatives 🤝

On Wednesday, Chris L participated in the regular monthly CoTech call. I really appreciate Chris making time to attend this - apparently there are moves afoot to run another event in the spring in Manchester! I’m super proud of the part that GFR has played in the creation and continued operation of CoTech. I can’t believe it’s almost 10 years since the founding event at Wortley Hall (the workers’ stately home!).

I’m also very encouraged to see that Solid Fund, a worker co-operative solidarity fund which we contribute to, has started to be a bit more proactive having already paid out £73,000 this year in support of a number of worker co-ops that have fallen on hard times.

Mission Patch 🚀

This week we received the first multi-item Mission Patch (custom laptop stickers) order since I added some shopping basket functionality in the giant pull request that Chris L mentioned a few weeks ago. I was pleased that it all went through without any drama.

Exercise 🏊🏃

Today Chris L popped out to the Parliament Hill Lido at lunchtime for a last outdoor swim of the year. Sadly I’ve fallen off the wagon of outdoor swimming at the Jesus Green Lido - I might try getting back into it this weekend.

In the meantime, Chris R is putting us both to shame by participating in the Track Wars - Project X event at the running track in Walton-on-Thames. He managed to run 50kms in 7h23m before retiring hurt - well done, Chris! 🏆

Until next time

– James