February 2026 — This sprint delivered core Beamline Control System compatibility and enhancements for DiamondLightSource/mx-bluesky, alongside notable improvements in code quality and safety. Key progress includes aligning import paths with the updated dodal library, adding beamline centering enhancements for i04, and implementing plans for beam center finding and transmission optimization. A composite class was introduced to streamline component usage, with accompanying tests to ensure reliability. In parallel, type-safety was strengthened by enabling Pyright's reportArgumentType checks, fixing type errors, and adding a pre-commit hook to prevent runtime issues. These changes collectively reduce integration friction with external libraries, accelerate beamline commissioning, and improve maintainability and robustness across the codebase.

January 2026 monthly summary for DiamondLightSource development teams. Delivered notable stability, control enhancements, and developer experience improvements across mx-bluesky and dodal. Key features included a decorator to manage transmission fraction and xbpm feedback during the grid detection in pin_centre_then_flyscan_plan, and beamline enable status synchronization during robot load/unload to improve safety and reliability. Major DevOps and maintenance work covered CI workflow enhancements, Docker/BlueAPI updates, and configuration cleanup with consistent parameter naming. Dev experience improvements included updated copier templates, richer testing configurations, and API naming consistency across projects. A critical bug fix ensured Murko thaw proceeds gracefully when Redis is unavailable, with tests and warning logs to validate behavior. Overall, these changes reduce runtime errors, improve operational resilience, and accelerate development cycles while improving observability and maintainability.

December 2025 highlights: Delivered configurable, hardware-aware enhancements in mx-bluesky, enabling dynamic mirror configuration via a config server and detector ID integration from hardware, significantly improving configurability and data integrity. Stabilized deployment and developer experience by removing SSH-based steps and updating BlueAPI in the Docker image. Expanded robust multi-beamline support in dodal with per-detector IDs in EigerDetector and simplified the arm trigger/disarm plan by removing the redundant nexpi setting. Strengthened test reliability and data precision across the stack by enforcing singleton treatment for DCM/undulator and correcting microns-per-pixel in test data. Improved resilience of MurkoResultsDevice by gracefully handling Redis outages and defaulting motor values to zero, reducing runtime crashes and ensuring continued operation during outages. Overall impact: higher configurability, faster deployments, more robust operation across beamlines, and improved data quality.

Delivered notable reliability and integration enhancements across DiamondLightSource/dodal and DiamondLightSource/mx-bluesky for 2025-11. Key features include OAV reliability improvements for i04, MurkoResultsDevice completion messaging with timeout, and beamsize device integration for i03/i04, plus system enhancements and XRC integration in mx-bluesky. These updates improve data capture reliability, experiment control, and maintainability, while expanding beamsize capabilities and reinforcing type-safety and documentation.

October 2025 monthly summary for ongoing development across the DiamondLightSource repositories (dodal and mx-bluesky). Focused on delivering robust Murko data processing, stabilizing tests, and updating dependencies to reduce risk and improve maintainability. The work enhances data quality, release traceability, and cross-repo collaboration while demonstrating modernization of test suites and ecosystem compatibility.

August 2025 monthly recap for DiamondLightSource/workflows focusing on delivering feature-rich workflow discovery, frontend UX improvements, and robust example templates, with targeted bug fixes and test enhancements to improve stability and user productivity.

Concise monthly summary for 2025-07 focusing on delivering new capabilities and stabilizing the frontend workflow experience across Diamond Light Source projects. Key contributions span two repositories: mx-bluesky and workflows. Key features delivered: - DiamondLightSource/mx-bluesky: I04 Beamline Grid Detection and XRC Experiment Plan Enhancement. Introduced a new I04 grid detect XRC plan, refactored Hyperion zebra setup into a phase1 module, and added import linting rules to enforce module dependencies, enabling more automated data acquisition and reliable experiment setups. - DiamondLightSource/workflows: Frontend environment and dependency management updates (Node.js version bump and Dependabot package updates) to improve maintainability and build reliability. - Workflow View: Task selection UX improvements with multi-select, URL synchronization, initial state from URL, and shared task state across components, leading to faster, more predictable task curation. - Workflow Artifact Display Enhancements: Show all artifacts when no task is selected, display task names next to artifacts, include parentTask tracking, and add hover-based indicators of related tasks for better traceability. - Relay Workflows Live Updates: Fixed a performance regression by memoizing the workflow mapping to reduce unnecessary re-renders in the workflow library. Major bugs fixed: - Relay Workflows live updates performance regression resolved via memoization to prevent unnecessary re-renders. - Several UI interaction fixes in the workflow view (task highlighting with breadcrumbs, and task click behavior in the search page) to improve reliability and user experience. Overall impact and accomplishments: - Increased automation and reliability for I04 experiment planning, reducing setup time and improving data acquisition quality. - Improved frontend maintainability and build reliability through environment upgrades and dependency hygiene. - Enhanced user experience and collaboration capabilities in the workflow UI, with more predictable task selection, artifact tracing, and faster UI responsiveness. - Significant performance improvement in live updates, enabling near real-time feedback in dashboards for faster decision making. Technologies/skills demonstrated: - Python-based workflow plan design and refactoring, module dependency management, and import linting rules. - Frontend engineering: Node.js version management, dependency management, React-based UI patterns, URL-driven state, and cross-component state synchronization. - UI/UX improvements: multi-select UX, artifact visualization, hover interactions, and breadcrumb-based highlighting. - Performance optimization using memoization to reduce re-renders and improve throughput.

June 2025 monthly summary focusing on key accomplishments across DiamondLightSource/mx-bluesky and DiamondLightSource/workflows. Delivered features that streamline beamline workflow, improve frontend UX, and enhance maintainability; no major bugs reported this period.

May 2025 focused on automation, reliability, and standardization across beamlines. Delivered i04 beamline device enhancements (grid detection, X-ray centering) and related device refactors, including beamstop evolution and standardization of auto shutter behavior. Implemented Murko results processing with a Redis-forwarded data path and angle-based processing for centering, plus PV-based data sources in OAV. Strengthened cross-beamline consistency with parameter parsing improvements and ISPyB deposition type handling. Enabled OAV to read beam center positions from EPICS PVs in addition to configuration files. Overall, these changes enhance data quality, reduce configuration drift, and improve operational safety and efficiency.

April 2025 monthly summary for DiamondLightSource/mx-bluesky. Delivered stability-focused dependency upgrades, documentation and parameter-handling improvements, architecture consolidation of rotation scanning, and a targeted bug fix for empty Agamemnon queues. The work enhances stability, reduces configuration complexity, and improves test coverage, contributing to more reliable experiments and smoother development workflow.

March 2025 monthly summary across DiamondLightSource/dodal and DiamondLightSource/mx-bluesky focused on code quality, correctness, and maintainability to deliver measurable business value. Key outcomes include stronger correctness guarantees for asserts, reduced runtime blocking, cross-repo documentation improvements, and resilience for experimental workflows. - Walrus usage policy and assertion correctness: enforced linting to ban walrus in asserts and prevent risky runtime behavior; production code now avoids time.sleep to reduce blocking. - Code quality and reliability: consolidated improvements across repos, including lint rule updates and API cleanliness (removing unused parameters, renaming to _thaw). - Documentation and process migration: updated cross-repo development docs and migrated configuration from setup.cfg to pyproject.toml to streamline builds. - Pin tip detection resilience: improved error handling to treat PinNotFoundException as a warning, allowing experiments to continue when pins are missing. Overall impact: reduced runtime risk, improved performance and reliability, clearer APIs, and streamlined development workflows that accelerate iteration cycles and deployment readiness.