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 a team, calling the new team “the OpenPrescribing team” could be confusing.

A couple of candidates were “the OpenPrescribing delivery team” and “the OpenPrescribing development team”. Alas, delivery means different things to different people: people outside the new team will almost certainly be delivering OpenPrescribing in some way and it would be unfair to suggest that our work delivered whereas their work didn’t. Neither candidate is consistent with the names of the other other tech group teams: the Researcher Experience team, or REX; the Reproducible Analytical Pipeline team, or RAP; and the Research Software Innovation team, or RSI. Consistent is hardly well-defined: “about the thing, not the people” and “sounds like the name of a dinosaur, mostly” are probably what we mean by consistent.

I asked my colleagues for their views and “sounds like the name of a dinosaur, mostly” was as close to the consensus view as I could find. There aren’t any dinosaurs with “prescribing” or “rx”, meaning prescription, in their names, so we invented the Prescribosaurus. After some prompting by Thomas, an LLM generated the new team’s mascot.

Welcome, Team Prescribosaurus!

What else happened this week?

• I’ve been reading the new codebase.
• I had a lengthy discussion about supporting claims with evidence.
• I had a lengthy discussion about Architectural Decision Records.
• I learned about what front-end development looks like in 2026.
• Peter and I discussed what Team Prescribosaurus might bet on next week.