Iain Dillingham

Weeknotes

Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 6 February 2026.

This week, I:

thought about when a user is a user
started writing a pitch
thought about what happens when “there’s not enough space on the dance floor”
learned about servant leadership
was reminded (again) that people issues are harder than technical issues

When is a user a user?

We’re working on OpenPrescribing v2. Dave and Peter built a walking skeleton at the end of last year, which Peter, Tom, and I took over at the start of this year. We’ve shown it to the OpenPrescribing network, to Rich, and to the Clinical Informaticians (a word my spelling dictionary refuses to recognise). Next week, we’re showing it to anyone in the Bennett Institute who can spare an hour on Tuesday afternoon.

During one of these show-and-tell sessions Chris, one of the aforementioned Clinical Informaticians, recreated a measure from v1 in v2.¹ This was really encouraging: when someone does something in the new thing that they could do in the old thing, then that’s evidence that the new thing is, in some sense, working. This made me think about whether Chris was a user of v2. He’d learned how to recreate a measure in the new thing; he’d used the new thing to complete a task! And this made me think: how much effort should we go to, to ensure that Chris doesn’t have to relearn how to recreate a measure in the new thing when we inevitably make changes to the new thing?

As it happened, Peter was midway through making changes to the new thing. He was replacing a text-based interface with a point-and-click interface that had a couple of modal windows and modifier keys. I suggested placing the changes behind a feature flag. I felt that asking Chris to relearn the interface, at least until we’d thought more about the modals and modifiers, would cost a small amount of goodwill. Peter felt that doing so was unnecessary. Asking Chris to relearn the interface wouldn’t cost that much goodwill. And after all, OpenPrescribing v2 isn’t a mature product.

In the end, we compromised. We asked Chris to recreate a measure using the point-and-click interface. Chris did so: he used the even newer thing to complete a task that he completed with the new thing and with the old thing! We shared the point-and-click interface using zrok, so we didn’t need to place the changes behind a feature flag. (Maybe zrok is a feature flag?) We may have earned a small amount of goodwill, too.

Time’s up!

Chris didn’t completely recreate the measure, because it required more information than was available. However, he came as close as he could. ↩

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ADRs