Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)
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Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)
#2(2019); discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19252952 (191 comments)
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)
#3I‘ve been using MS Access some twenty years ago to do all sorts of magic for small businesses. That was from the 90s to the early 2000s. - Later I‘d use Python to do magic for companies who didn‘t know anything better than MS Excel to handle large sets of data, and when they were lost in chaos, I‘d start to streamline, process, tidy their data and help them make sense.
Just two examples that showed me: Use whatever helps you to get the job done, automate and streamline processes, select tools that might give you a competitive advantage.
Edit: I love Emacs, for everything text and code and some more, but there are way better tools for the task the author describes.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)
#4In his follow up post he talks about union combining identical results. If the author ever reads this, you can prevent that by using `union all` instead of just `union`. That won't remove duplicates.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)
#5This is super cool, but I’d worry a lot about passing on the domain knowledge to somebody else without a dead-simple TUI/GUI. Eventually somebody else will need to run things.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)
#6I‘ve been using MS Access some twenty years ago to do all sorts of magic for small businesses. That was from the 90s to the early 2000s. - Later I‘d use Python to do magic for companies who didn‘t know anything better than MS Excel to handle large sets of data, and when they were lost in chaos, I‘d start to streamline, process, tidy their data and help them make sense. Just two examples that showed me: Use whatever h…
Emacs (esp. with org-mode) sits close to the barycenter of the space of problems like this, where the vector sum of "effort to use the solution to solve the problem" and "engineering effort needed to build the solution" is quite low. Building a React web app, or a Visual Basic bespoke app, might yield a nicer to use program, but would require more effort than throwing something together with Emacs Lisp, SQLite, and org-mode.
It's one reason why I won't give Emacs up, again despite half of Hackernews being convinced the VSCode will solve world hunger.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)
#7I‘ve been using MS Access some twenty years ago to do all sorts of magic for small businesses. That was from the 90s to the early 2000s. - Later I‘d use Python to do magic for companies who didn‘t know anything better than MS Excel to handle large sets of data, and when they were lost in chaos, I‘d start to streamline, process, tidy their data and help them make sense. Just two examples that showed me: Use whatever h…
Only vaguely related: what would be the Access equivalent of today? Somethings with low learning curve and forms.
Any suggestions?
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)
#8I‘ve been using MS Access some twenty years ago to do all sorts of magic for small businesses. That was from the 90s to the early 2000s. - Later I‘d use Python to do magic for companies who didn‘t know anything better than MS Excel to handle large sets of data, and when they were lost in chaos, I‘d start to streamline, process, tidy their data and help them make sense. Just two examples that showed me: Use whatever h…
Emacs (esp. with org-mode) sits close to the barycenter of the space of problems like this, where the vector sum of "effort to use the solution to solve the problem" and "engineering effort needed to build the solution" is quite low. Building a React web app, or a Visual Basic bespoke app, might yield a nicer to use program, but would require more effort than throwing something together with Emacs Lisp, SQLite, and o…
I love Emacs and Orgmode, especially in combination with Sqlite. And I am convinced that VS Code - despite doing so many things right - does not have the versatility and the capability of Emacs, no matter how many packages are written for it because it is not intended to be configured by it‘s end users in a way where they read the code of the packages, learn from them, change them according to their needs and automate all kinds of processes / workflows with it. Emacs is an application framework for the user with a hacker mindset. And Emacs Lisp is the underlying scripting languages that invites you to play around with your tool.
Having said that: Yes, you can run your business with Emacs alone. But I am not convinced it is the right tool for the job.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)
#9I‘ve been using MS Access some twenty years ago to do all sorts of magic for small businesses. That was from the 90s to the early 2000s. - Later I‘d use Python to do magic for companies who didn‘t know anything better than MS Excel to handle large sets of data, and when they were lost in chaos, I‘d start to streamline, process, tidy their data and help them make sense. Just two examples that showed me: Use whatever h…
Only vaguely related: what would be the Access equivalent of today? Somethings with low learning curve and forms. Any suggestions?
Simple CRUD apps with Python + Flask or Django I‘d say.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)
#10This is super cool, but I’d worry a lot about passing on the domain knowledge to somebody else without a dead-simple TUI/GUI. Eventually somebody else will need to run things.
I'd also worry about bugs accidentally inserting bogus data into it.
The author says he doesn't like spreadsheets because of all the copy and pasting, but I think that's a feature.
You go over every calculation to make sure it's right, and once you have a template sheets to copy and paste for a monthly report or something, you're able to do a lot less of that.
It can be hard to view a raw database to track issues down depending on how it's structured. Usually you need more than viewing tables as spread sheets at least.