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.

Ended up doing one more feature before bed. It's a little hacky and I might need to rework it later if I want to add more features, but that's a problem for future me. For now it's working as intended.

Had to take a brief break to unmelt my brain (not because I was trying to do something difficult but because I was about to do the easy thing in a way that was more difficult than it needed to be) but got done more than I planned on. That might be it for today's productivity, but I'll give some thought to what should come next.

Dinner has been eaten. Now to see if I can finish up another chunk of work.

Found a documentation bug, but taking a different approach entirely cut the work my code needs to do in half.

Last night I finished my latest bottle of whiskey and it occurs to me that there's most of an open bottle that came with the house, abandoned by the previous owners. I suspect it was first opened a few decades ago and I assume it's no longer delicious.

I don't need another project, but my sister is talking like I might need another project, mainly because the thing she wants I know she'll hate anything she can just buy and I won't be able to fix it for her, whereas she /might/ hate a thing I make less and fixes would be possible.

Updated the shop's web site with the new coffees today.

Testing the past couple day's code by running a sweep through the relevant range of values and graphing the output in a spreadsheet pointed me at the existence of a bug which, once fixed, validated my hunch from several years back that the extra math involved in the new code did not produce a significant difference from computationally cheaper approach I went with originally. I still want to try a blend of the two methods with live data to see if the slight difference feels better.

Had some administrative responsibilities at the shop to take care of but now I can spend the rest of the day at home coding with the cat. I should be able to slam out the idea I noted yesterday as most of what I need for that is already done.

Today's code is mostly directly pulled from 1.9.1 but I've taken the opportunity to make some minor efficiency improvements.

The idea may also be applicable to CRUCS, so I might add it there some day, though that's a low priority for me.

Had some thoughts on a feature improvement for Typica that I might be able to slam out tomorrow. While the existing feature that's mainly intended for calibrating measurements among different roasting machines has worked very well for me, there's room for improvement both in showing the user what their settings do and reducing artifacts that betray the current approach.

It's 3AM and I'm eating popcorn.

There was a big cat in my driveway when I got home from work today.

After tasting the new coffees on their own it'll be moving on to figuring out the blends, and then I'll have a bunch of roasting to do to get the shelves filled back up and get the orders shipped out, and at some point I'll need to update the web site and choose prices for the new stuff/update labels and PLUs.

Alternating between evaluating production test batches of new coffee and writing software. I've had a good week in terms of getting stuff done (and things generally working on the first try).

I wasn't planning on doing two different roasts of the new decaf Colombian coffee, but it takes a darker roast better than I expected so I'll see if I still think that after drinking the production test batch tomorrow.

Anyway, it looks like I should be able to get a couple nice distinct roasts out of this one (the whole range that I evaluated was quite good). Looking forward to tasting production test batches on drip tomorrow.

New coffee from El Salvador is very sweet. Sweetness in coffee often doesn't quite mean what people who don't have sensory training might think when they hear sweet, but several of the cups I'm evaluating here do just straight up taste like someone emptied a sugar packet into the cup.

Tonight's code compiles. Left myself a note for the next thing to work on so I can remember that when I wake up.