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oli.zilla.org.uk
olizilla
@oli.zilla.org.uk
130 followers 180 following 150 posts
Researching interop in the NHS
https://oli.zilla.org.uk
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Reposted by olizilla
thattommyhall.com
"If a vulnerability has been public for two years and you have not been breached, the market has spoken" wise words as always
January 11, 2026 at 1:45 PM
oli.zilla.org.uk
incantation upgrade! @andrewnez.bsky.social taught git to be package dependency history aware.

ask git the history of a dep, who added it to the repo, when was it last upgraded. this is very good.
andrewnez.bsky.social Andrew Nesbitt @andrewnez.bsky.social · 11d
Annoucing git-pkgs, explore the dependency history of your git repositories.

git pkgs init
git pkgs blame
git pkgs history rails
git pkgs diff --from=v2.0
git pkgs stats
git pkgs why rails
git pkgs diff --from=HEAD~10
git pkgs diff --from=main --to=feature

nesbitt.io/2026/01/01/g...
git-pkgs: explore your dependency history
A git subcommand to explore the dependency history of your repositories.
nesbitt.io
January 2, 2026 at 9:05 AM
oli.zilla.org.uk
Suena Bien Soundsystem is jumpin at the Railway Tavern tonight!
beautiful orange and yellow handmade speakers tower majestically next to a flying Carlos; arms raised to the sky, partially occluding ethereal hand blown glass tweeters that gleem atop the stack.
December 31, 2025 at 1:41 PM
oli.zilla.org.uk
"You wouldn't gild a lilly" in the style of "you wouldn't download a car".
December 27, 2025 at 10:15 AM
oli.zilla.org.uk
i've been hand coding imperative lockfiles for systems this whole time!?
December 19, 2025 at 9:59 AM
oli.zilla.org.uk
me: standardisation is good!
them:
A diagram, made in 2025, showing an abstract process to standardise 3 different date formats to a 4th date format which matches none of the existing date formats and is also not aligned with the international ISO 8601 format, a standard for formatting dates first published in 1988.
December 16, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by olizilla
eaves.ca
In 1886, workers converted 14,000 miles of railway track in 36 hours. Today, moving a government's data or application from AWS to Azure may feel harder...

Something went very wrong with how we built the cloud. 🧵

www.techpolicy.press/the-path-to-...
The Path to a Sovereign Tech Stack is Via a Commodified Tech Stack | TechPolicy.Press
Strategic standardization of cloud infrastructure backed by procurement power and market forces is the right way to tame the hyperscalers, writes David Eaves.
www.techpolicy.press
December 15, 2025 at 10:57 PM
oli.zilla.org.uk
Population of Estonia: 1.3 million
Population of NHS England: 1.5 million

digital.nhs.uk/data-and-inf...
NHS Workforce Statistics - August 2025 (Including selected preliminary statistics for September 2025) - NHS England Digital
We’re the national information and technology partner to the health and social care system using digital technology to transform the NHS and social care
digital.nhs.uk
December 9, 2025 at 1:45 AM
oli.zilla.org.uk
@b5.bsky.social on brand with incredibly clear messaging again.
screenshot of b5 giving a talk a sync conf. a happy coincidence leaves him standing next to a big cropped text of the word NO (He's Number0, N0) as well as his intended message "dial keys, not IPs"
December 8, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Reposted by olizilla
dryad.technology
Developer attempts to replicate "Liquid Glass" in CSS, and once finished realizes what she'd actually created is an exploit for a fundamental, previously unknown, and rather serious browser vulnerability

lyra.horse/blog/2025/12...

"CSS hack accidentally becomes regular hack"
SVG Filters - Clickjacking 2.0
A novel and powerful twist on an old classic.
lyra.horse
December 5, 2025 at 2:03 AM
Reposted by olizilla
dame.is
interoperability is a lot more important than decentralization
norman rockwell free speech meme
December 2, 2025 at 8:39 PM
oli.zilla.org.uk
The NHS "owns" the Canonical Data Model (CDM), the interface to the Federated Data Platform that all existing systems are to integrate with and that new systems should build on. This is what the CDM interface looks like today.

github.com/nhsengland/f...
Screenshot of the Swagger Open API editor showing the NHS Canonical Data Model REST API. The API name is "Palantir OpenAPI". API routes are all prefixed with `/api/v2/ontologies/palantirukhealth-ontology`
December 2, 2025 at 4:47 PM
oli.zilla.org.uk
sure but did you ever see the composite gifs that explain how a vinyl groove encodes a stereo signal!?

www.vinylrecorder.com/stereo.html
November 28, 2025 at 8:24 PM
Reposted by olizilla
leftoblique.bsky.social
This is an insightful but deeply upsetting article about why everyone in the US feels poor, and why the current political situation emerges as a direct result.

www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-...
Part 1: My Life Is a Lie
How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America
www.yesigiveafig.com
November 26, 2025 at 1:42 AM
Reposted by olizilla
erlend.sh
Anti-fascistic software is made possible by pro-labor licensing.

I've been trying to write this piece for years. Every time I get started I'm just overwhelmed with paralyzing visions of the FOSS commentariat accusing me of WrongThink.

But I'm tired and we urgently need to get our shit together.
Open Source Power
We have to talk about open source licensing.
blog.muni.town
November 14, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Reposted by olizilla
mattseybold.bsky.social
“Adversarial poetry.”

Love this. Obvs.
November 20, 2025 at 5:53 PM
oli.zilla.org.uk
absolute highlight of the week was the @inkandswitch.com meetup and talking to @wolkenmachine.bsky.social about his work on programmable ink, and catching a wild @expede.wtf and @pvh.ca too!

That team remains brilliant, radical, and decent in equal measures.
November 14, 2025 at 5:26 PM
Reposted by olizilla
marcusbaw.com
Despite the vast sums spent on GP and hospital IT, we're not even able to losslessly maintain a single patient's digital clinical record for their own direct care for their lifetime without degradation.

Join us, to help address this issue.

www.tickettailor.com/events/dpc/1...
RSVP – Healthcare Archives Group Meeting – Zoom
Healthcare Archives Group Meeting – Zoom, Thu 20 Nov 2025 - The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is hosting an open meeting to address some of the challenges surrounding healthcare data and health...
www.tickettailor.com
November 10, 2025 at 7:46 PM
oli.zilla.org.uk
Lambeth got us mutually amending an EHCP via mailing .doc files between many parties and this is absolutely not a viable mechanism for tracking and merging conflicting edits.
monstrous use of italic and bold to denote changes proposed by either the of the at least 5 parties editing this document. You bold up your changes, you bold strikethrough your deletes, in a word .doc that is emailed to you. You send it back, they make their changes in italics, and send you perhaps the combined changes or maybe the word doc formatting fails, and your solicitors have to ask them to start again because editing the doc now changes the formatting which in this world actually also changes the meaning.
November 6, 2025 at 12:27 PM
oli.zilla.org.uk
from server racks to soundsystems
November 6, 2025 at 10:00 AM
oli.zilla.org.uk
Trying to map the many contracts the NHS has with software companies.

In theory there are APIs for this but so far the onboarding has been "email this private supplier for an API key" (Find a Tender API) and also "ask permission for each resource you want to access and wait for approval" (NHS ODS)
November 4, 2025 at 10:19 AM
Reposted by olizilla
chrisshank.com
Server Charms are tiny, portable microcontroller setups made with recycled vape batteries. They create their own Wi-Fi network, inviting curious people to connect with their devices where a captive portal opens, leading to small webpages.

codeberg.org/actinomy/ser...
"To serve is to offer something, a name, a website, a document, an idea –something to be shared, something that connects us. But who serves whom? Serving can be a painful experience. It is a relation that carries histories of gendered violence, histories of slavery, serfdom and oppression as we are taught by archives of resistance, black feminists and anti-colonial scholars. This violence extends to the materialities of the earth which is made to serve as resource, ready to be extracted for the minerals that make up the very chip that carries these thoughts as binary strings of information. Serving does not have to manifest as violence if we insist otherwise. Serving can become an act of empowerment when we build infrastructures that serve the needs of local and remote communities evolving around situated knowledge of those around us – while keeping in mind privilege often determines who has access to a community and its resources. The complexities of the internet with its corporate and state entanglements, its huge data centers, relentless data crawlers and transatlantic fibre cables can feel inevitable. To delink from time to time means to shift our focus back to the local networks and groups that we are already part of. We know that the internet is much more than its corporate occupants, it is about forming connections and sharing resources. Independent, selfmade networks remind us of the physical connections that are the base of all kinds of signal transmissions. Intimate networks that make us share and mitigate our vulnerabilities through trust and kinship. In the smallest scope, networks such as this ones."
October 28, 2025 at 5:50 PM
Reposted by olizilla
duncanjbrown.com
A few ideas on what "good software" (not "good code"!) is, touching ethics, interop, commercials and functionality

🧵
charity.wtf Charity Majors @charity.wtf · Oct 27
for context: the second edition of "Observability Engineering" starts off swinging with an opinionated chapter called "The Fundamentals of Building Good Software".

which begs the question... what IS ✨ good software ✨?

i'll drop my answers 👇 but curious to hear others.
hazelweakly.me Hazel Weakly @hazelweakly.me · Oct 27
@charity.wtf asked a great question on LinkedIn today. Her question was: "What is ✨ good software ✨?"

I'd love to hear your answers, but I'd also like to share mine. So if you'll allow me a moment of indulgence... 🧵
October 27, 2025 at 6:41 AM
oli.zilla.org.uk
an arm protrudes from a cold lido. the autumn sun picks out a tall block in a warm orange light. the water absolutely looks chappin. it was.
October 24, 2025 at 8:15 PM
oli.zilla.org.uk
"mandatory functional cookies" are only to be used to keep me in a meeting, not to show me a blog post.
October 24, 2025 at 4:03 PM