Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 9 January 2026.
This week, I was occupied by setting up the new team. We’re working on OpenPrescribing, but as there’s already a group of people who are associated with OpenPrescribing,1 and as that group of people refer to themselves as …
read moreWeeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 2 January 2026.
After another hiatus, weeknotes are back. A lot has happened in the last six months. Nevertheless, these are weeknotes. What happened this week?
I’ve been reading about prescribing data, BNF codes, and dm+d codes in preparation for starting work …
read moreWeeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 20th June 2025.
I’ve been reading about continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), and trying to imagine software development without pull requests (PRs). Although Ben B.C. has talked about this before, my prompt was returning to a PR with unresolved comments …
read moreWeeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 13 June 2025.
As last week, additional paternity leave!
This week I learnt about git rebase --committer-date-is-author-date.
Normally after a rebase,
the author date is that of the original commit
but the commit date is that of the new commit.
With this option,
the …
Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 6th June 2025.
Paternity leave! More specifically, additional paternity leave!
The University of Oxford Additional Paternity/Partner Leave scheme means I have 10 additional weeks of paternity leave. Needless to say, the scheme is amazing.
Last week I started thinking about pair programming as …
read moreYou’re a junior academic at a British university. You know it’s important to publish your research in high-impact journals. You’re already the first author on several papers. But you’re worried: you need more. And the journals aren’t high-impact enough.
Someone from the university’s Department …
read moreWeeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 30 May 2025.
I updated my script for creating weeknotes. It now creates an article for a given date, rather than for today’s date, which means I’m less likely to run it on Friday and struggle to remember what I did that …
read moreI became a tech lead in December 2024. My team is small: just Alice, a junior developer, and me. We were asked to work alongside researchers and health informaticians on the OpenPathology project with the aim of designing, implementing, and evaluating dashboards. Here, I’d like to reflect on my …
read moreWeeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 23rd May 2025.
Katie showed me a code snippet within which I noticed the following idiom:
del a_list[:]
I was sure that [:] copied the list,
but I wasn’t sure what del did to it.
Deleted a copy of the list?
Deleted the contents …