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Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)

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Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)

#41

Post by AlexCoventry »

codemonkey-zeta wrote: post #26
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #5

This 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.

Will this be software the author will ever have to pass on? I'd guess probably not, considering it's software for his small bakery. It's software directly tied to his identity - he's the sole consumers. That's exactly the kind of software emacs is great for, and precisely the kind of software "hacker" types use. He's not going to sell this as a "bakery management system" and become a software company, he's just going…

If he wants to grow beyond a single shop, he'll either need a standard entry format, or be prepared to compete for employees against enterprises which actually need a high degree of technical literacy.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)

#42

Post by redisman »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #41
codemonkey-zeta wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will this be software the author will ever have to pass on? I'd guess probably not, considering it's software for his small bakery. It's software directly tied to his identity - he's the sole consumers. That's exactly the kind of software emacs is great for, and precisely the kind of software "hacker" types use. He's not going to sell this as a "bakery management system" and become a software company, he's just going…

If he wants to grow beyond a single shop, he'll either need a standard entry format, or be prepared to compete for employees against enterprises which actually need a high degree of technical literacy.

A software engineer starting a bake shop doesn't exactly sound like someone looking for a "scalable" business.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)

#43

Post by adrianN »

Tostino wrote: post #40
radiowave wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, though his work-around of adding a path column is something is worth having anyway, because it makes it much easier to see where the generated output has come from.

It is forcing the engine to do more work though, because it demands a distinct result set, so it adds extra nodes to the plan to remove duplicates. If you know your query doesn't have duplicates, it's much smarter to not add an extra whole sort/distinct when totally unnecessary for correct results.

I'm fairly sure that a bakery doesn't produce the amounts of data where you need to worry about such things.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)

#44

Post by supernova87a »

Yeah, this is geeky and technically pleasing, but destined to live only as long as the guy has enthusiasm or the will to keep doing this as a small business. As soon as it comes time to have someone take ownership or manage the system, the model breaks. What retail bakery employee is he going to find to maintain the SELECT * FROM statements and look at the Github repo for release notes?

There was a post a few years ago with the message "don't get too clever or special when designing a system if you want it to be maintainable for any reasonable cost by an average programmer". I think this is related...

Edit: the bakery website is gone or down, 2 years after the story.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)

#45

Post by monsieurbanana »

supernova87a wrote: post #44

Yeah, this is geeky and technically pleasing, but destined to live only as long as the guy has enthusiasm or the will to keep doing this as a small business. As soon as it comes time to have someone take ownership or manage the system, the model breaks. What retail bakery employee is he going to find to maintain the SELECT * FROM statements and look at the Github repo for release notes? There was a post a few years a…

Meh. It's a system deployed on production that works, and is being used weekly. If he ever gets to the point where he needs to employ someone to do it, the system will be mature, and building a web ui rather straightforward.

Or it might not, but if he's successful to the point of getting employees, he can start worrying about it then. Isn't that like the number one advice for entrepreneurs? Don't worry prematurely about scaling out.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)

#46

Post by 7thaccount »

jsilence wrote: post #7
submeta wrote: post #3

I‘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?

Sqlite plus some kind of scripting language plus some graphical viewer for that database.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)

#48

Post by _huayra_ »

I love me some Emacs and the aspect of not having one's data rolled up into some inscrutable proprietary binary is certainly appealing.

However, are there viable open-source programs to specifically meet this need (i.e. the daily operations of a small business)? I've seen a lot of startups around this (e.g. ipads at a lot of checkouts now for small businesses), but is there anything that allows the business to not have their data beholden to some 3rd party?

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)

#49

Post by Stranger43 »

jsilence wrote: post #7
submeta wrote: post #3

I‘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?

The phpmyadmin(backed by mysql), html4, and apache mod_php platform, probably deserves an mention here as it did play an huge part in the migration from offline PC databases to online webapp's in the space where MS Access was prevalent.

The conventional wisdom in 2021 would probably lean toward python+flask+postgre rather then the traditional lamp stack but i am not sure that's actually an superior solution for the entry level user/designer compared.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)

#50

Post by Tostino »

adrianN wrote: post #43
Tostino wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is forcing the engine to do more work though, because it demands a distinct result set, so it adds extra nodes to the plan to remove duplicates. If you know your query doesn't have duplicates, it's much smarter to not add an extra whole sort/distinct when totally unnecessary for correct results.

I'm fairly sure that a bakery doesn't produce the amounts of data where you need to worry about such things.

Eh, it's all relative. You can make some queries perform pretty terrible even with tiny data. It's something that has had measurable performance impacts on queries I've had to tune and deal with with over the years.
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