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.

Found the root of the issue. Still weird that it was only affecting one data series, but I'm pretty confident that this is fully fixed now.

Finally got a good read on the problematic state triggering the bug I was working on yesterday and it was not quite what I expected. It is still a complete mystery to me how the problem was only manifesting on a single channel so I may want to dig into that a little more, but there's a fast and easy check that prevents the issue from spreading into the rest of the program so I'll take that as a win for now and keep exercising the new code to make sure there's nothing else I'm missing.

I'm almost certain I know what the problem really is now, but I'd like to see the full details of the failure before working out what the fix needs to be.

Lately I've been trying to track down a calculation problem in one of my programs. It's the obnoxious sort that sometimes happens a lot and sometimes runs for hours without issue. I've at least gotten as far as identifying what I think is the first place in the code the issue can be detected, but after putting in more extensive debug output to capture erroneous state without interfering with live use, the problem stopped again. I'll keep checking back with it over the next couple days.

Removed the weird limited edition Sumatra from the web site. I still have some available to buy locally in person, but I don't have any more available to roast.

Just packed up the third batch of Holiday Blend produced today. This is a tricky one to plan for because people keep buying it all today, but they won't want it next week.

One of today's emails trying to sell me something I'm not buying included a product photo with a big finger in frame. I'm surprised they chose to use that one.

I'm going to try to replicate the first and last cups from the middle row. The lighter one is excellent on its own while the darker is potentially more versatile in blends.

Time for coffee.

My last coffee delivery for the year arrived while I was out running errands. I hadn't gotten the PRO# to track this and see that it was getting delivered today, otherwise I would have waited for it, but staff handled it perfectly without me so I'll be able to get on with product development right away.

Restocked my rice supply.

My mother wanted a microwave for Christmas this year so we got that sorted out today. My favorite feature of her new device is that if you don't set the clock (she already has 2 clocks in the room that she's not using) it doesn't show anything on the display. No flashing 12:00, no lights (and certainly no blinking lights).

Personally, I will always prefer a thoughtfully created purpose built interface for anything work related even if only for the massive feature discoverability benefits (rather than asking if the system can do something and then get a lie in reply).

Got an email advertising AI features and I'm looking at their examples and one can be done with a shell script. The next one is a trivial front end feature. The third one is a SQL query (or an automated report built around one). It would take me longer to think up the natural language prompts than to just click on the right thing in a well considered interface built around their pre-AI API. Not sure how their customers would be using them without already having a better integration than this.

I still have a bit of a wait on the Sumatran coffee since we didn't get any of that, but the last batch I roasted of that was on the larger side so hopefully there isn't too much disruption there.

It took a while to get all the paperwork sorted since the last coffee shipment to arrive had everything not quite right and there's a certain level of figuring things out on the business side when that happens, but I can finally start tasting the new coffee and hopefully get Colombian coffee back out for sale.

Got my car emissions tested today. Took it to a place I hadn't been before and got some of the worst driving directions I've ever gotten from Google. Very poor routing throughout with an instruction at the end to I guess jump the median barrier? I didn't follow that last instruction.

Had to leave the house to handle a hospitality emergency. Family is visiting my mother and they brought wine which they couldn't open because my mother apparently doesn't have a corkscrew (she doesn't drink) so she's borrowing one of mine.

Today's work is apparently all about dealing with minor annoyances. While I'm glad that none of the problems that are getting passed to me are critical issues, there certainly are a lot of things going slightly wrong today that involve finding the right person to get stuff fixed.

One of my suppliers sent me a promotional calendar... for the year 2025... in December, 2025.