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.

Any offer I'd be willing to accept right now would have to be substantially above a fair market value to compensate for the annoyance and expense of finding another place to live and moving all my stuff there.

Kind of wish the home investors would collectively take me off their mailing list. I have no interest in the hassle of moving, don't want to have to go looking for another place, and the unsolicited offers are coming in at half of what the house next door is listed at. I've been in that house. Mine is better, so the offers seem frankly exploitatively low ball and unserious.

There was mystery bakery waiting for me when I got to work today.

Found a very nice coffee dead center in the range that I consider as where potentially delicious light roasts can be found. There was also a neat dark roast a bit lighter than what I had with breakfast where it's not so interesting on the first sip or when fully cooled, but if you chug it when half cooled it's great. But between the very limited supply that I have and the high price I'm going to need to charge, I think it makes more sense to only offer the lighter roast.

Before doing the tasting to see how I want to roast it, I've made myself a cup of the super dark stuff that's left over to roast those lighter samples and despite the roast it's still... unique. Clearly dark, but with a bit of lychee and an effervescent quality, almost as if it were made with fizzy water. Hoping I'll find something in my samples that presents with better balance because as a super dark roast it mostly just comes across as weird. Interesting, but not especially accessible.

Lately I've been trying to get to the bottom of a bug that has been happening but it seems like it should not be possible. Today I had about an hour of run time with the problematic hardware in which the bug was not observed despite no code changes since the last time I saw it. The only difference I can think of is that the hardware was plugged into a different USB port and I will be annoyed if that turns out to be a reproducible trigger for the behavior.

One coffee, 15 roast levels. Looking forward to tasting these tomorrow.

The last of my coffees in transit arrived today and I've recently roasted the last of another coffee for which I already have the replacement lot so today I'll be working on figuring out how I want to roast those.

There's signage threatening more road closures that would block my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th alternate routes to and from work. My first choice has been closed off for entirely too long and the 2nd choice is intermittently unavailable. If they don't start opening some of the roads back up I'm going to have to start going the opposite direction from work and spiral my way in.

My sister slightly overbaked some cookies so I get to eat some of those.

Was going to mess around on a synth patch I've been working on lately but one of the cases wouldn't power on properly. It worked fine last night, but I guess I've got a bit too much power draw happening there. Not surprised as it's my cheapest case and there's a few things in there with higher power requirements. Taking one module out got it powering back up again but I decided to just move everything into a case with a beefier power supply.

Production test roast of the new decaf Peru turned out nicely. Doesn't taste like a decaf. It's also retailing $7 per pound more than it was the last time I sold a decaf Peru (granted, it's been a while, it's only $2 higher than our most expensive decafs otherwise currently on the shelf). Unfortunately, it does look like as I sell out of our current stock the replacements are going to cost more. I'm still buying less so that if prices come down I'll be in a better position to lower mine too.

There's probably a reason why mail servers don't have a way to temporarily whitelist receiving replies to messages they've sent but someone should probably work on that given the gross and intentional incompetence on display among blacklist providers.

Evaluating the new decaf Peruvian coffee that was delivered yesterday. This is one of those that's hard to screw up as it's delicious across a broad range of roast levels and the changes are somewhat subtle. If you're the sort who has strong preferences for a particular roast level you can probably just roast it like that and expect to get something nice as a finished product and if you're not that skilled at controlling the roast you can be off by a lot and still end up close in the cup.

It turns out that a bug I thought was resolved is not. At this point I'm probably going to have to resort to entirely too much logging to get to the bottom of this.

Today's coffee delivery has arrived. I've also placed an order for a couple boxes of this one to arrive soon. I'll have to charge a lot for it and I expect it to sell out pretty fast. https://royalcoffee.com/product/3427097000044428849/

More Costa Rican coffee got delivered today. It's the same lot as the previous delivery so no need to rework the roast profiles there.

Replied to an email that seemed to be legit, but their mail server said unknown user so they're going to need to fix that if they expect replies.

Needed to rework a couple blends now that I'm out of coffee from Sulawesi. The next Breakfast Blend might be my new favorite among the blends. It's using coffees from Mexico, Guatemala, Sumatra, and Papua New Guinea (watch for a roast on date later than today).

Today's coding was mostly just reading documentation that's a bit too diffuse and figuring out what all goes where to make the computer do what I want. There are examples out there that are all not quite what I need, but now that I've sorted out the foundation there's a lot that I can build on top of today's work. I could have taken a few different approaches and not had to go through the hassle, but the end result of today's work seems like it'll be nicer to work with in the long run.