Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL • Hacker News Board

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#101

Post by pdcawley » Tue, Feb 26, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

maire wrote: post #34

projectramo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. The spreadsheet is an amazing innovation, I just find all the repetition when adding something that should just be data to be monumentally frustrating. And I have no idea how to make a sheet that copes with orders for Friday and Saturday when a when each batch takes three calendar days. I suppose making a new copy of the basic sheet for each batch would do the job.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#102

Post by hnarn » Tue, Feb 26, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

burger_moon wrote: post #99

I'm going to be the unfortunate hater, but it sounds like he should spend more time on actually learning how to be a baker and less time writing code in this particular case. This is what I'd imagine most of the people on here would fall into the trap of when the monthly 'I want to quit and work with my hands' post comes up. It's the cliche, I want to disrupt the industry before I even learn it. My girlfriend works a…

Every single person that I've met that is a huge fan of Emacs has also had a tendency to get stuck in the technical aspects of things rather than seeing the bigger (non-technical) picture. This isn't meant as flame bait, I genuinely mean that these people have all been very intelligent, but they have all shared this peculiar quirk of absolutely over-engineering things to the point where it's kind of amusing. Your comment made me think that this is exactly how that kind of person would approach baking.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#103

Post by kazinator » Tue, Feb 26, 2019, 5:53 PM UTC

burger_moon wrote: post #99

I'm going to be the unfortunate hater, but it sounds like he should spend more time on actually learning how to be a baker and less time writing code in this particular case. This is what I'd imagine most of the people on here would fall into the trap of when the monthly 'I want to quit and work with my hands' post comes up. It's the cliche, I want to disrupt the industry before I even learn it. My girlfriend works a…

I don't think he's doing anything that a large scale bakery wouldn't also do, just on a smaller scale. I mean, some outfit that ships baked goods to retail stores all over a metropolitan area. They need to control parameters of the production process to ensure consistency at scale, plus handle all the logistics of scheduling all the processes and delivery.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#104

Post by pdcawley » Tue, Feb 26, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

ohnoabigshark wrote: post #64

Former CS major, current chef/owner checking in. Restaurants feel pretty ripe for voice assistants/AR but unfortunately lack the necessary technological and financial capital to make it happen, imo. Being able to record and retrieve important information without stopping your work (pulling up and scaling a recipe while chopping onions, for example) saves an immense amount of time in the kitchen. This is especially tr…

The echo dot is an essential part of the bakery. Multiple overlapping named timers, fired off without having to touch anything? Get in!

Once I start the mixes, everything runs from paper though.

Maybe somewhere a long way down the line I’ll make an Alexa skill, but it’s not a priority.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#105

Post by ubermonkey » Tue, Feb 26, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

weavie wrote: post #63

ubermonkey wrote: post #47

I haven't read the article (yes, I know, sorry), but the headline reminded me of a donut shop here in Houston. I don't know if the sign is intentionally this way, or if the middle letter of the first word in the name fell off, leaving behind the short, horizontal mount point, but either way it amuses emacs folks a lot, because it appears to say: M-x Donuts Who among us hasn't wanted, at least once, to invoke that mod…

This one? https://i.imgur.com/E4EkEMf.png

The very one. It's on the northwest side of the city. This is funny to longtime Houstonian nerds, because that's the area where Compaq was, and where Digital was, and which is now HP I think. (?)

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#106

Post by pdcawley » Tue, Feb 26, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

kiallmacinnes wrote: post #7

rahimnathwani wrote: post #6

Earlier 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…

For the actual business of making the bread it’s a matter of printing off a single production schedule for the day and taking that into the bakehouse. Touchscreens are a hygiene nightmare in food prep areas.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#107

Post by d0mine » Tue, Feb 26, 2019, 5:58 PM UTC

burger_moon wrote: post #99

I'm going to be the unfortunate hater, but it sounds like he should spend more time on actually learning how to be a baker and less time writing code in this particular case. This is what I'd imagine most of the people on here would fall into the trap of when the monthly 'I want to quit and work with my hands' post comes up. It's the cliche, I want to disrupt the industry before I even learn it. My girlfriend works a…

May be you got it backwards: people who can't deal with numbers have to stick to the same routine. They can't afford the flexibility, the optimization.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#108

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Feb 26, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

pault wrote: post #28

kome wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

IMO it's more a product of people expecting more from software. It's no longer enough to have something that works; it has to work and be pretty and user friendly.

I wonder who does that. All my experience with non-tech people tells me that they don't expect anything from software, just accept how it is, but they do get annoyed if it doesn't let them do their jobs quickly. Designing for the needs of normal people seems to go in the exact opposite direction to the current UX trends. When UX trends lead to slow, thin, shiny applications, users would be happier with dense and fast applications which minimize time spent in them.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#109

Post by ohnoabigshark » Tue, Feb 26, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

pdcawley wrote: post #104

ohnoabigshark wrote: post #64

Former CS major, current chef/owner checking in. Restaurants feel pretty ripe for voice assistants/AR but unfortunately lack the necessary technological and financial capital to make it happen, imo. Being able to record and retrieve important information without stopping your work (pulling up and scaling a recipe while chopping onions, for example) saves an immense amount of time in the kitchen. This is especially tr…

The echo dot is an essential part of the bakery. Multiple overlapping named timers, fired off without having to touch anything? Get in! Once I start the mixes, everything runs from paper though. Maybe somewhere a long way down the line I’ll make an Alexa skill, but it’s not a priority.

Yeah, named timers are A+ and also having basic math functions at hand is great. We have a couple different tasks that need to be started at a certain time each day, so we also have reminders that go off at said time.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#110

Post by zbentley » Tue, Feb 26, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

paddy_m wrote: post #79

I'm trying to help my girlfriend manage the inventory for her cactus business. She raises cacti from seed, cuttings, but mostly from wholesale suppliers. She has a square account and store. I’m trying to set up inventory tracking for her. There are couple of things that make her business different than most inventory holding businesses. 1. Generally her inventory increases in value over time because it grows. Over ti…

Django is a decent start. I suggest keeping it as simple as possible, and providing easy export of data to CSV’s or spreadsheets, so she can do reporting and analysis in a more free-form fashion (and you don’t have to build a reporting system).