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.

Email subject line, "Is your network ready for AI?" I'm thinking there's no way that isn't 100% a scam.

Roasting staff has now received trackball training. I thought that might be useful since when I asked the crew how they felt about trackballs before buying one I got "what's a trackball?" as a response.

I don't think any piece of spam will ever top the one that started something along the lines of, "I'm happy to know you are in the market for life size animatronic dinosaurs." Sometimes I wish I were.

I figured that with the constrained space something you don't have to move around might be better and since it'll be used from a standing position the ball seemed like a better ergonomic fit than a track pad.

Mouse on the computer at the production roaster started sending random scroll events so today I replaced that with a trackball and we'll see how that goes.

The crew putting in a driveway at a house across the street seems to have done a good and efficient job over there. Hopefully nobody comes along to mess things up before the concrete sets.

Finished up a little thing. Did a bit of waffling on the design of one of the parts but got something that's working. Wish I had waffles.

Also deleted a bunch of code left over from some unrelated exploratory work that was ultimately a dead end since none of it was needed for the solution I eventually got to. I thought I'd already deleted all of that, but I guess not.

Implementing something that I sketched as a redesign and am far enough along in that to see that I do, indeed, like the new design better from a usability perspective. I feel like the new design makes what it is more obvious, shows more information, and saves 1 click per operation for mouse users.

Purchased theater tickets.

Today's coding work was mostly just moving code around to make pieces interact in a way that's nicer, but there was also a case of running into a limit that wasn't in the old version of a dependency (because I wanted to see how bad performance got in a degenerate case [surprisingly not that awful]) and working around that when it may be necessary.

I guess we're having explosions again tonight.

Power came back on at the shop. I arrived just in time for Internet service to also come back.

Closed the shop early. Power outage expected to last through after close so we let a few people buy stuff that doesn't require mains power and waited for people to get tired of sitting in the dark. I'll come back in the evening to do a proper reset for tomorrow morning.

Ran into another case of can't just re-use the old code because it relies on stuff that's been removed in newer versions of a dependency. The required functionality is still there, it just needs to be accessed in a slightly different way.

For any martians wondering where the kaboom is, it's apparently here.

Today's coffee is one that I didn't have any direct involvement in. It's pretty good.

Today's code is another case of taking a step back from the idea I started with and coming up with something better to do instead.

Continuing to make progress with the Typica 2.0 rewrite. Today I'm working on the Batch Details report. To start with this is just minor enhancements over what was in 1.9.1, but I've left myself some notes on what I think could be significant improvements some time after a preview release.