Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

#introduction

I'm part owner and roaster at a little coffee company in Wisconsin. Author of Typica, a popular free program used to capture and work with coffee roasting production records that's used at roasting companies all over the world. Volunteer on the Roasters Guild education committee. Available for paid coffee consulting, training, open source software development. Living with a cat who broke into my house and decided to stay. Likes: cute, travel, food. Dislikes: blinking lights.

Not sure what changed but I've been noticing more problems with unintended duplicated key presses lately while typing. Pretty sure it's a hardware problem but I've jacked up the repeat delay setting and that seems to have mostly fixed it. Still, it's probably getting closer to time to replace the laptop.

New coffee from Honduras smells amazing.

Slower or faster and operator anxiety shoots way up and with that comes a reduction in control accuracy and an increase in mistakes resulting in failure to hit product spec. Faster incoming data rates can still be useful because you can apply well known statistical methods and get cleaner data at human friendly rates ($1 microcontrollers have enough compute these days to do that) but most of what's out there just doesn't really bother.

Based on actual user/usability testing, software for monitoring what's going on in a coffee roaster should be presenting updated data somewhere in the range of 2 to 10 times per second, with 4-5 updates per second being an especially good sweet spot for maximizing operator joy. This is something that computers from 3 decades ago would not have struggled with.

The third is a competing free option that was just never really designed for larger scale use and is missing a ton of features that home roasters don't need but anybody trying to operate with batch to batch consistency should have.

Another is a commercial sponsor of the event that I get to have a little chuckle about every few years when their marking brags about a feature they could have mined from my software more than a decade prior.

One is software from the roaster manufacturer which prompted me to contact them about certain design decisions that can cause safety problems but that also was so slow that I pulled open the electrical box to write down part numbers and look up spec sheets to find that they could be driving their whole UI a lot faster for better user experience.

First text from the employee I sent to an educational trade event says she's having fun but also that the software they've got set up on their roasters is bad. Based on what I saw the last time I taught at the venue there are 3 things that she might be experiencing.

I wasn't planning on doing a baking through after close shift without getting to go home for at least a few hours in the middle today but more work came in and I'd rather take the money. Tomorrow is also looking like an extra long day.

Yesterday's coffee delivery includes the return of the coffee with the megalomaniacal frog on the bag, a new coffee with a squirrel on the bag, one with mountains and coffee plant parts, and one labeled for delivery to Ukraine which I hope is just a case of someone stenciled all the bags that way and not a case of prior contract cancelled due to war.

Coffee arrived a day earlier than scheduled. Glad I was keeping an eye on the tracking, but the arrival was too late in the day for it to make sense to start on product development work today. I'm instead trying to stay away from people because after moving all that in I'm smelly and in need of a shower, but it's too close to closing so I'm kind of stuck here for a little while.

One of my employees will be heading off for a trade event to hang out with people who do the same sort of work she does and learn some stuff from people who aren't me. She'll also get some first hand experience on significantly worse software than what she gets to use here (by some measures the things that she's likely to see set up have not caught up to the reference implementation I published 2 decades ago and she's been using pre-release stuff with further significant improvements).

There was a rabbit hanging out on my back porch today. It's usually cats but not today.

Roasted the last of my Bolivian coffee and ordered new coffees from El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Mexico, and Papua New Guinea. Those should arrive some time next week and I'm really looking forward to working on those.

Production test batches of the new Guatemalan coffee were delicious so that's up for sale on the web site now. It's rare for us to sell 3 distinct roasts from a single coffee but I think it's a good call for this one. https://wilsonscoffee.com/

Went to water my mother's indoor plants and discovered that the postal service has failed to pause her mail delivery. It looked like 2 real pieces of mail and then the rest of the box was stuffed with things from places hoping she'll give them money. I guess I should check the mail box at my sister's house to see if that needs to be emptied, too. (They're both on vacation.)

Snagged a free book from a shelf labeled "free books" and now that I'm looking at it a little closer it has at the front what could have been a useful index if only someone had thought to put page numbers next to the entries. Now I have no idea where in the book to look for "how to make water wetter".

The light roast version is very much in line with how a lot of other roasters these days would approach this coffee and I think this coffee takes that sort of approach very well. The medium and dark roasts are more in line with what I was doing with the coffee this is temporarily replacing.

Removed the previous Guatemalan coffee from the web site, made roasting decisions on the next one which is a peaberry version from the same place, but I'm going to do production test roasts tomorrow and make final decisions the day after pretty early in the morning since I'll be baking again that day. If it works in a drip brew I'm thinking that we'll do a light, medium, and dark roast.