121–130 of 194 posts
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…
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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.
Steve Yegge told this story: > Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for ... four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it. > People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I'm not shitting you. Last Christmas I was at an Amazon party, some party I have no…
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Your loss. (Also, Org Mode beats the crap out of Anaconda/Jupyter notebooks. You can still code Python, but the interface is actually ergonomic.)
It. Doesn’t. Matter. Use the too, you’re comfortable in and you’ll be way more productive than dropping everything to learn something new. Do that when the limitations of your current tool start to grate on you.
> Use the too, you’re comfortable in and you’ll be way more productive than dropping everything to learn something new.
That's not true, and this kind of thinking can be dangerous to your productivity - especially if the tool you're comfortable in is one of the new breeds of popular applications or SaaS. Each tool has a productivity ceiling. Software like Emacs or Vim has that ceiling somewhere in the stratosphere; a typical web-based tool has the ceiling ridiculously low, barely letting you stand up. On that spectrum, dropping everything and learning a tool that gives you more space to grow does pay off very quickly.
Edit: I should clarify that when I say "small(ish)," I'm referring to the number of discretely moving pieces and dependencies, not to, e.g., the size of a binary, or how many batteries are included, etc.
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…
But today, my customers want 9 large multigrain loaves, 4 small ones, 3 really small soup bowl loaves, a dozen large white sours, 5 small and a couple of dozen bun loaves. On Friday they will want substantially different quantities. If I want to keep selling 95–100% of everything I bake, then I need accurate quantities, and I’d rather offload that essentially trivial calculation on a tool that gets it right every time. Five minutes after I arrive in the bakehouse, I have an accurate production sheet with the right quantities on it and I can concentrate on the far more important task of actually making the bread. I’ve spent maybe a couple of days, over the last year and a bit implementing the production planning software. Time well spent, I reckon.
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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.
That's what I was thinking too. Perhaps this guy has greater aspirations for his bakery and laying out the foundation like this from day 1 will enable him to grow without many of the pains you might otherwise experience when expanding your business.
This 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…
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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. (?)
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Don't knock Microsoft Access for this sort of thing.
Good point -- Access is a great middle ground between kludging something together in a spreadsheet and writing an entire app from scratch.
Is there anyone else who has written software for bakeries / bread makers?
There is definitely a lack of good baking software in the industry. all the spreadsheets I saw when I worked were overly complicated and error-prone. Maybe one day I can expand on the app and work with some bakers on it :)