That's the most HN title I've seen in a while.
Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
31–40 of 194 posts
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#32Frustratingly thin on details about the actual bakery (perhaps not surprising since it's a blog series). All I could figure out is this Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/theloafery/.
It seems he mainly sells at a market.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#33I have only ever been a tech hobbyist, but I have leveraged my Python skills in a similar way. I run a home cleaning service with my wife, and I started using Airtable to track clients, jobs, expenditures, employee hours, etc. The data entry became tedious due to having to make entries in multiple tables for each job, so I wrote a Python script to use a simple command line read-eval-print loop to collect job information and make entries in the appropriate Airtable tables through the Airtable API.
I also use Python to produce paycheck stubs, do simple business data analysis, and email me leads from our website.
A small tangent: I have recently become frustrated with the limitations of a command line interface (primarily the inability to display charts and graphs), but there is a dearth of solid alternatives. Both web frameworks and GUI frameworks add far too much complexity for a solo amateur developer to quickly iterate to meet a small business' needs.
I would love to have a product that let me produce ugly but practical GUIs in Python without having to learn a big framework like PyQT or Django. EasyGUI comes close, but isn't quite good enough.
For now, I update an HTML file to display graphical output in Python and use a Firefox extension to auto-refresh the page on changes.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#34This 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.
> Google Sheets with Google Forms (or whatever it may be called) for some users.
That was my reaction too. I have a google sheet for bread that allows for different batch sizes and displays out baking instructions in english. This is what a cell looks like: ="mix "&D3*B$1&" grams of "&C3
I can look at the sheet on my phone when making bread. Sheets also now caches off line.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#35Frustratingly thin on details about the actual bakery (perhaps not surprising since it's a blog series). All I could figure out is this Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/theloafery/ . It seems he mainly sells at a market.
That's funny, I was wanting more details on the bakery as well. I'm wondering how much of a pay difference he's experiencing going from software developer to bakery owner.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#36This 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 know a lot of financial analysts who don’t know how to “program” but develop incredibly complicated Turing complete excel models regularly. Excel is a very flexible tool and can be leveraged to great effect.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#37This 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 know a lot of financial analysts who don’t know how to “program” but develop incredibly complicated Turing complete excel models regularly. Excel is a very flexible tool and can be leveraged to great effect.
I know for a fact that up until around 2006 the official US Treasury curve for one of the big financial reporting firms was created/maintained on an Excel spreadsheet that was one step away from becoming sentient and asking us if we wanted to go get high.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#38I have only ever been a tech hobbyist, but I have leveraged my Python skills in a similar way. I run a home cleaning service with my wife, and I started using Airtable to track clients, jobs, expenditures, employee hours, etc. The data entry became tedious due to having to make entries in multiple tables for each job, so I wrote a Python script to use a simple command line read-eval-print loop to collect job informat…
If you're familiar with python, try jupyter notebooks.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#39This. Being able to run easily selectable scripts on pieces of selected text in my editor is what keeps me in vim. Doing repeatable tasks, filling XML data, gosh, I even keep my odometer book in vim via small hacked together python script.
People keep recommending things like Visual Studio Code, but I am yet to find a way to do it there... Is it even possible?
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Millions of people used WP5, with its cryptic codes and huge keyboard overlays. I don’t believe that’s any easier than Emacs (or HTML). People can figure things out, when they have to.
Cryptic, yes, but discoverable! Recently I was trying to help someone fix their bizarrely broken Word document, and I would have given my right arm for "F5 Reveal Codes."