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.

2nd coffee I'm working on today was more straightforward. I found exactly what I was looking for in one of the roasts while the other I think I'll find right in between two of the roasts I tried. No need to edit the plans for that. I can just load what I did on the little machine directly.

The faster data series here is what happened at the roaster for the darker of the roasts that is closest to what I want. The slower one is how I've decided to stretch that out. For the lighter option, I'll try the same plan just stopping quite a bit earlier.

First coffee that I'm working on today it seems like I'll want to slow the roast down significantly. There's good flavors in there and I'll be able to get the coffee to do what I want, but my first guess at an overall profile was just way too fast. I'll load the data into https://crucs.net/ and tweak things there before trying again. Very glad I spent the time working on that roast plan editor.

Went looking for a crash condition that I noticed last night, this time with a debugger attached. The crash was triggered a couple lines earlier than I was expecting (thinking about it a little more I do understand why), but the fix is the same regardless so that's solved.

One of my wholesale customers expressed interest in one of the coffees delivered today so I'll use dropping a sample off as an excuse to check out their place now that they're open.

The new paper is pretty nice, thick, oddly textured. One of my employees is going to take it home and use it as weird gift wrap.

Coffee has arrived. The paper used to separate organic certified coffee from not certified coffee has changed. This is something that really doesn't matter to me because the legislation around organic labeling has for a long time been written purely for regulatory capture by big food companies against the smaller businesses that built the market for organic products and our response to that was to keep buying organic coffees when they're good but not sell them as such.

Today someone was very disappointed that a place calling itself "Wilson's Coffee & Tea" sells coffee instead of cell phones.

I don't have a delivery window, but it looks like I'm getting coffee tomorrow.

Had a weird issue when trying to move the latest code over to the machine at the coffee roaster. One symbol from a library the code uses failed to resolve. It's definitely not something new that got added since the library was installed on that machine, but the version present does seem to be about 4 years old and uninstalling the old library and installing the latest version and dev headers fixed the issue.

I had a hunch that the number was higher, but running the report I was surprised by how much higher the proportion of sales that aren't in store retail are (so wholesale, online, &c). Normally that's under 1%. Early pandemic dropped that closer to 0. So far this year it's at about 2.3% and it would be higher than usual even if it weren't for our most recent wholesale customer. Not bad considering that we put pretty much no effort into those segments.

Bought another 1600ish pounds of coffee. Mostly stuff that I haven't carried in a while.

Despite being well over 100 years old, it's only been held by 2 families including the carpenter who built it for himself so I already know a lot about how the house has changed in that time.

Got a letter at home from one of the non-profits my shop works with, which was very confusing, but it's because my house is old and part of their work is documenting old houses.

Finished testing, tuning, and integrating the last feature I wanted to add before moving a new build into production. While I was at it I also fixed a minor graphical glitch

It's official. I'm sending one of my employees off to an event to learn stuff and socialize with industry peers. There aren't other people in town with her job who don't work here so I think it'll be a good opportunity for her. The company is, of course, paying for that.

I still need some waiting for the glue to cure, but so far it looks like I won't be able to see the defect at all so that at least is a decent outcome.

One of my figure pre-orders arrived today. Sadly it arrived broken. The manufacturer made the slightly odd decision to ship it with the head assembled and attached to the body and somehow the bit that connects the head to the body snapped. The seller offered me either a return for refund or a partial refund if I wanted to try to repair it myself. Fortunately, the break was a good shape and location and the refund is more than enough for a bottle of the glue I used one drop of.

Perfectly timed pizza pick up. Neither I nor the pizza had any wait time.

Did a bunch of code changes around today's coffee roasting session. All little things where most of the functionality was already present and I just needed to hook things up to the UI. Also set my Mom's phone up to receive email since she'll want to have that capability on her next vacation for stuff she can't schedule before she's on the road. Sending doesn't work because I couldn't find the settings for using TLS for that on her device.