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patlog.co.uk - A free place to log PAT inspections

I had some free time this week - between working on Libregig, the Chobble Template, and my Patreon - and was looking for something to do, when I saw that a fellow nerd in the bouncy castle-adjacent world, Spencer, had written a PAT Inspection Logger desktop app.

Portable Appliance Testing (PAT) is a process for testing electrical items, and despite not being a legal requirement in the UK is nonetheless regularly demanded of hirers of electrical equipment by their customers - schools, councils, and other organisations who haven't caught up with the times. They'll sometimes ask to see a recent PAT certificate covering any equipment they're interested in.

Having to do needless tests just as a box-checking exercise is annoying enough, but then needing to track those in a system that can generate certificates, to provide on request, makes it an even more frustrating job - hence Spencer's app.

It was cool to see the app built in C# - I wrote loads of C# when I worked at The Bouncy Castle Network albeit on the web, not desktop - but the bouncy castle world is not a particularly technically-minded one, and I knew that very few people would download the app and compile it to run on their machines.

So, I set about translating the app into a Rails app that I could host for people. I made heavy use of Claude Code to parse Spencer's C# code, write a comprehensive spec, and then re-implement it as a straightforward Rails app.

This wasn't vibe coding. I was reviewing each change Claude suggested, regularly digging it out of corners, and writing the few fiddly bits myself. But I was definitely able to work much faster by using it to translate the existing, working app, and to write a bunch of tests.

After a couple of evenings I'd got a pretty good beta version up on a demo site, with a couple of extra features on top of the PDF-generating original version:

I initially thought I might be able to charge some nominal fee for access to the site, but Spencer rightly pointed out that nobody is making any money doing PAT tests - it's a necessary evil - and they're unlikely to want to pay a per-test fee just to host the test online.

I also wasn't looking forward to having to build the Stripe integration.

So, I decided to make the project entirely free. I recorded a brief overview of how the system works, and put it up on patlog.co.uk, hosted on on my Gandi NixOS VPS.

It contains an advertisement for myself in the footer, but is otherwise entirely gratis. The source code is released under the AGPLv3 copyleft license.

So, if you need to log PAT tests, the details are: