Great uplifting article. It's awesome to see a geek get ahead in business by using his/her favorite open-source tech tools.
Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
11–20 of 194 posts
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a downside to this though .. For this bakery, if you hire someone, theres a reasonable chance they can use a spreadsheet (maybe not add new recipes etc, but use..). I'd bet is very unlikely the same will be true of SQL and emacs. In tech/development, it's akin to someone building a system in some obscure language, because they are most productive and the only ones developing it today.. It's likely that syste…
This is a very important point. Choose tools that are: (1) right for the project (2) right for the current team (3) right for the future team (3) might be hard given you don't know who joins later, and the engineers might also not have a say if they're not involved in hiring. But you can generally make decent guesses. The odds of the next baker you higher knowing SQL and emacs? Pretty low... the odds they know Excel?…
SQL gives the developer an option to build a front end of some sort, though, which might be able to get the ease of use to a similar level to that of Excel.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
"There's no way you can do something similar with spreadsheets?" You can, but the author is using tools that are more familiar to him, and hence more productive for him. Just like when doing some quick and dirty analysis, some people will reach for Excel, some for R, some for Pandas. None of those people is wrong. Some people go too far the other way: spend too much time learning new tools, and not enough creating th…
There is a downside to this though .. For this bakery, if you hire someone, theres a reasonable chance they can use a spreadsheet (maybe not add new recipes etc, but use..). I'd bet is very unlikely the same will be true of SQL and emacs. In tech/development, it's akin to someone building a system in some obscure language, because they are most productive and the only ones developing it today.. It's likely that syste…
This is like using a hammer to mend everything around you.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#14This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional. Sure, open source makes everything rather accessible from a monetary point of view, but you still have to learn things. I almost feel like in the past there were more attempts at making this accessible to the end user, HyperCard, dbase etc, even just BASIC on your 8-bit machine. Nowadays? Excel/G…
> This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional.
Humans can understand ratios, write stuff down, plan for the future, etc all without org-mode in emacs, databases, and sometimes without even a calculator.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
"There's no way you can do something similar with spreadsheets?" You can, but the author is using tools that are more familiar to him, and hence more productive for him. Just like when doing some quick and dirty analysis, some people will reach for Excel, some for R, some for Pandas. None of those people is wrong. Some people go too far the other way: spend too much time learning new tools, and not enough creating th…
I'm not saying it's the wrong approach, I'm saying I don't understand what the problem is. The initial example to motivate moving from a spreadsheet to SQL is only this: recipe ingredient quantity Small Seedy Malt Seedy malt dough .61 kg Large Seedy Malt Seedy malt dough .92 kg Having to tinker with recipes in SQL sounds really bad as well compared to editing a spreadsheet even if you were an SQL expert.
Yeah, he didn't explain that part well. Bakers typically have ingredients in terms of ratios with respect (usually) to the mass of the main flour. There could be up to a dozen ingredients (sometimes just 3) with time and temperature sensitive processes. A typical small artisinal bakery will have a repertoire of a couple dozen baked goods. It's a fair amount of stuff to keep track of especially when you throw planning/scheduling into the mix.
One doesn't need anything more than a notebook (a paper notebook that is) to do this stuff, but to each his own.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#16This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional. Sure, open source makes everything rather accessible from a monetary point of view, but you still have to learn things. I almost feel like in the past there were more attempts at making this accessible to the end user, HyperCard, dbase etc, even just BASIC on your 8-bit machine. Nowadays? Excel/G…
There's a fair amount of low code type web application makers. Google's AppMaker, Quickbase, Zoho Creator, Knack, Airtable, etc.
No real comparable open source equivalent for these types of things yet.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#17This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional. Sure, open source makes everything rather accessible from a monetary point of view, but you still have to learn things. I almost feel like in the past there were more attempts at making this accessible to the end user, HyperCard, dbase etc, even just BASIC on your 8-bit machine. Nowadays? Excel/G…
Can't remember where I read the story, Steve Yegge perhaps. But they were talking about how where they worked secretaries actually used Emacs apps developed by the IT department and, over time, the secretaries started to extend the apps with Elisp.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#18This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional. Sure, open source makes everything rather accessible from a monetary point of view, but you still have to learn things. I almost feel like in the past there were more attempts at making this accessible to the end user, HyperCard, dbase etc, even just BASIC on your 8-bit machine. Nowadays? Excel/G…
Google Sheets with Google Forms (or whatever it may be called) for some users. Or, without internet, Excel.
The spreadsheet is sort of one of those insane breakthroughs where it really makes programming (functional at that) really easy to grasp. And you can iteratively and intuitively add hundreds of variables and logic gates.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#19This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional. Sure, open source makes everything rather accessible from a monetary point of view, but you still have to learn things. I almost feel like in the past there were more attempts at making this accessible to the end user, HyperCard, dbase etc, even just BASIC on your 8-bit machine. Nowadays? Excel/G…
> I almost feel like in the past there were more attempts at making this accessible to the end user, HyperCard, dbase etc, even just BASIC on your 8-bit machine.
Oh for sure, look at web: we transformed something simple and beautiful like html+css in a complete shit show.
Also, I don't feel like the new programming languages are easier then COBOL or BASIC, quite the contrary. We are making technology more complicated for no reason.
Or at least, at the time we had the very complicated stuff and stuff that simplified complexity. Think about S and SPSS.
Now we have complicated and very complicated. We are giving less creative possibilities to the end user: making them consumers, first of all.
Other example VB6.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#20> The key insight is that a bakery formula is so cliched that it can be represented as data. Here’s the formula for seedy malt loaves: > Of course, that’s not the full set of formulae, because it doesn’t tell you how to make ‘Seedy malt dough’, but that’s just another formula, which consists of flour, water, starter, salt and a multiseed ‘soaker’, where the starter and the soaker are the results of other formulae, wh…
It can be much easier to do certain things with a proper database than in a spreadsheet if you are familiar with both technologies.