19 ms·

Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

465 points by flocial 8y ago

estsauver 8y ago
This is pretty cool to see. I frequently about how much most businesses could do if they just has a database to back there core business operations.
- perlgeek 8y ago
  That's pretty much part of my job :-) I work at a German IT outsourcing company that builds and runs its own datacenters (but also provides SaaS, ISP services, domains, the whole shenanigans). We have a central database that was started basically at the same time as the company itself, and now covers asset management, semi-automatic billing, network management (and much more) but is also used to generate configuration for mail servers, web servers, DNS servers, radius, DHCP, etc. Recently, topics such as revenue forecasts and being useful in compliance audits have become more important. I like to think that this central database has played a part in the steady growth and success of the company, but it's hard to say without doing controlled experiments (to which leadership would most likely object :D).
dsr_ 8y ago
It's a pity that I read the title first, because when I read the recursive descriptions I immediately thought about a Makefile that emitted directions, cumulative timing, and optional ingredient debit entries for an ordering system. But SQL is OK.
seanwilson 8y ago
> The key insight is that a bakery formula is so cliched that it can be represented as data. Here’s the formula for seedy malt loaves: > Of course, that’s not the full set of formulae, because it doesn’t tell you how to make ‘Seedy malt dough’, but that’s just another formula, which consists of flour, water, starter, salt and a multiseed ‘soaker’, where the starter and the soaker are the results of other formulae, which are (finally) made from basic ingredients1. I did consider reaching for the object oriented hammer at this point, but thought that I might be able to do everything I needed without leaving SQL. There's no way you can do something similar with spreadsheets? The example wasn't in enough detail for me to understand why not. The jump from spreadsheet to SQL seems massive in terms of ease of use.
- rpod 8y ago
  Especially since org-mode has a built-in spreadsheet system that supports formulas written in emacs calc or even arbitrary elisp: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro...
  - ams6110 8y ago
    I really should learn that. I often find myself maniupulating text data in emacs, turning it into CSV or something that I can then copy/paste into a spreadsheet for calculations.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      You should. It's surprisingly good. You won't get pivot tables (at least until someone codes them up, which isn't out of the question in Emacs community), but for regular calculations it's awesome. Here's a short intro: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro.... Here's some documentation: https://orgmode.org/manual/The-Spreadsheet.html https://orgmode.org/manual/The-Spreadsheet.html And if you feel that TBLFMs are getting unwieldy, here's a bunch of features I absolutely love: https://orgmode.org/manual/Advanced-features.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Advanced-features.html. Turning on an extra column lets you name columns and cells, and have Org Mode recalculate the table automatically on any change, instead of on explicit command.
      - rpod 8y ago
        I didn't know about calculation marks, thanks for sharing! I use org spreadsheets to keep track of my D&D party's character sheets, so this should definitely come in handy :)
- rahimnathwani 8y ago
  "There's no way you can do something similar with spreadsheets?" You can, but the author is using tools that are more familiar to him, and hence more productive for him. Just like when doing some quick and dirty analysis, some people will reach for Excel, some for R, some for Pandas. None of those people is wrong. Some people go too far the other way: spend too much time learning new tools, and not enough creating things of value.
mhd 8y ago
This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional. Sure, open source makes everything rather accessible from a monetary point of view, but you still have to learn things. I almost feel like in the past there were more attempts at making this accessible to the end user, HyperCard, dbase etc, even just BASIC on your 8-bit machine. Nowadays? Excel/Google Sheets for the most simple case, probably, but if you have to transfer data from/into there or present it differently? Web sites and GUIs aren't that easy, but it's what the users know. If your point of interaction with a computer is more bare-bones (eg a BASIC/DOS prompt), solutions feel closer, easier to grasp.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  > This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional. One would simply make bread the same way as it has been done for 1000 years! Humans can understand ratios, write stuff down, plan for the future, etc all without org-mode in emacs, databases, and sometimes without even a calculator.
  - pdcawley 8y ago
    Yup. Bakeries have been run using a pen and paper daybook and the master baker’s skill for centuries. But the calculations are still a pain in the arse, so automating that is a big win. The Bread Matters spreadsheet I based the database schema on was made by someone who was a baker, not a programmer, and for a fixed set of recipes, it’s brilliant. If I hadn’t known the rudiments of RDBMS design I’d have bitten the bullet, extended the sheet and grumbled every time I had to add a new formula.
  - biztos 8y ago
    Down the street from me is a baker so good he doesn't even have any signage, you have to know it's there -- the line out the door at certain times might be a hint -- and as far as I can tell, other than punching in the prices in the minimum cash register required by law, they keep no records at the point of sale. I don't know if he keeps spreadsheets or even databases elsewhere -- I hope he does, as he's an amazing baker and works his butt off, and I hope he makes tons of money. But I really don't think he has any record of, say, whether Rye or Spelt sells out faster. (It all sells out every day.) So I wonder if there's some level of artistry where optimization might just be an annoying distraction.
w8rbt 8y ago
Great uplifting article. It's awesome to see a geek get ahead in business by using his/her favorite open-source tech tools.
black-tea 8y ago
I see that I'm not the only geek who likes baking. When I was a PhD student I seriously considered packing it all in and starting a bakery. I'd just discovered what seemed like the forgotten secret of good bread: time. At the that time in the UK most bakery bread was terrible and bread recipes in books or online called for short rises in warm places. I had to go back to older books to discover the secret. I would have been ahead of my time if I'd actually gone through with it. These days it seems that the secret is out again with recipes calling for 6+ hour rises. In the town I used to live there is a very successful artisan bakery now.
- MycroftJones 8y ago
  I notice recently that the hipsters over on Metafilter are trying to smear bread bakers as "brogrammers" and "neckbeards". What is wrong with them. And you are right about the rising time. I do an 8 hour rise. Doctor Carrie Reams said that the rising time breaks down the phytates which in turn releases the calcium into a form that the body can digest. 2 hour rise doesn't do that.
olalonde 8y ago
That's the most HN title I've seen in a while.
unwind 8y ago
Frustratingly thin on details about the actual bakery (perhaps not surprising since it's a blog series). All I could figure out is this Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/theloafery/ https://www.facebook.com/theloafery/. It seems he mainly sells at a market.
- parkjon 8y ago
  That's funny, I was wanting more details on the bakery as well. I'm wondering how much of a pay difference he's experiencing going from software developer to bakery owner.
  - czbond 8y ago
    My longtime buddy owns two combination cafe/coffee shops/bakery (2 units total). He called me yesterday looking for an ecommerce strategy job (which he did previously) since the incredibly low wages, and long hours were enough.
  - taude 8y ago
    I had a friend who owned a really popular food truck in the LA area. After a couple years he went back to IT work because he could make more with more reasonable hours.
  - philsnow 8y ago
    It's nice to work with your hands and produce something, but the margins you can earn with your time are going to be an order of magnitude larger with a tech job than any job involving producing physical goods like bakery / coffee shop / brewery, unless you achieve a lot of scale (distributing your product to large chains or similar).
- perlgeek 8y ago
  Maybe try asking him on twitter? https://twitter.com/pdcawley https://twitter.com/pdcawley I've been following him for some time (met him IRL at a conference in Kiev, Ukraine), and he's generally friendly.
istjohn 8y ago
I have only ever been a tech hobbyist, but I have leveraged my Python skills in a similar way. I run a home cleaning service with my wife, and I started using Airtable to track clients, jobs, expenditures, employee hours, etc. The data entry became tedious due to having to make entries in multiple tables for each job, so I wrote a Python script to use a simple command line read-eval-print loop to collect job information and make entries in the appropriate Airtable tables through the Airtable API. I also use Python to produce paycheck stubs, do simple business data analysis, and email me leads from our website. A small tangent: I have recently become frustrated with the limitations of a command line interface (primarily the inability to display charts and graphs), but there is a dearth of solid alternatives. Both web frameworks and GUI frameworks add far too much complexity for a solo amateur developer to quickly iterate to meet a small business' needs. I would love to have a product that let me produce ugly but practical GUIs in Python without having to learn a big framework like PyQT or Django. EasyGUI comes close, but isn't quite good enough. For now, I update an HTML file to display graphical output in Python and use a Firefox extension to auto-refresh the page on changes.
- ses1984 8y ago
  If you're familiar with python, try jupyter notebooks.
- photonios 8y ago
  What about Tkinter? https://wiki.python.org/moin/TkInter https://wiki.python.org/moin/TkInter Very simple and maybe a bit limited, but quite easily extended with some libraries.
  - istjohn 8y ago
    I've looked at it, but I would be writing hundreds of lines of code just for the interface, which would really slow me down. I really want to be able to focus on business logic and slap together a minimal interface in an hour or so. And unfortunately, I'm not able to code every day, so the more interface cruft I have to wade through, the longer it will take me to dig back into it in the future when I need to make changes. EasyGUI is built on top of TkInter but takes care of all the details to give you a handful of super-easy-to-use basic widgets. It would be perfect if it was just a little more finished.
vanous 8y ago
This. Being able to run easily selectable scripts on pieces of selected text in my editor is what keeps me in vim. Doing repeatable tasks, filling XML data, gosh, I even keep my odometer book in vim via small hacked together python script. People keep recommending things like Visual Studio Code, but I am yet to find a way to do it there... Is it even possible?
rekshaw 8y ago
As people flock to become programmers, as a population we will become increasingly technologically literate. Sooner or later we will enter an age where programming is as second nature as writing. Communication at the end of the day is a way to get people to understand what we want. Programming is very similar only directed at machines, and as machines continue to replace people in trivial (and not so trivial) tasks, that will be the lingua franca. And yes, it will be javascript.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  The population who currently struggles with its/it's and they're/their/there, basic (con)sequential logic, and even universal remotes is unlikely to become productive in anything like our current text-based languages. For this flocking to happen, it's going to look more like a spreadsheet, block language (Scratch-esque), or Hypercard type system than a text language. Even there, I don't expect it to become a mainstream activity.
- netsharc 8y ago
  I've read the assertion that the spreadsheet is the first "programming environment" for the general population, and I like the idea. Input some numbers into 2 or more cells and the most basic function would be that the output is the sum of these numbers, displayed in another cell. https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/ offers a drag and drop environment, although indeed the general public would not understand the nodes ("TCP, mqtt, websocket?"), if they could make it more general it would be "easy" to make branches, which is what an if-else-statement is.
- intertextuality 8y ago
  I think you have a biased outlook, to be honest. For every handful of programmers I know, I know at least 100 others who maybe can barely use their computer besides basic apps. Programming is still not intuitive (nor enjoyable) for the vast majority of people, and I believe it will stay that way.
  - petercooper 8y ago
    Agreed, I think programming as a skill will follow a similar arc to automotive engineering. Early on it was highly specialized, but from the 50s-80s it was generally expected that you knew how to maintain your car and would do the basic jobs yourself (oil, tires, maybe even filters). But now? A lot of people now would even call out AAA to change a wheel.
ubermonkey 8y ago
I haven't read the article (yes, I know, sorry), but the headline reminded me of a donut shop here in Houston. I don't know if the sign is intentionally this way, or if the middle letter of the first word in the name fell off, leaving behind the short, horizontal mount point, but either way it amuses emacs folks a lot, because it appears to say: M-x Donuts Who among us hasn't wanted, at least once, to invoke that mode?
- weavie 8y ago
  This one? https://i.imgur.com/E4EkEMf.png https://i.imgur.com/E4EkEMf.png
  - ubermonkey 8y ago
    The very one. It's on the northwest side of the city. This is funny to longtime Houstonian nerds, because that's the area where Compaq was, and where Digital was, and which is now HP I think. (?)
    - ddavis 8y ago
      Thanks for sharing! Unfortunately Emacs came into my life after I grew up and left Houston, but if I ever find myself up 249 while on a visit I'll be sure to stop in.
- sevensor 8y ago
  When I was a child, we would always drive past a particular convenience store on our way to my grandmother's house. At some point in history, it must have been called "Self Service Mart," but the first S had long since fallen off. I loved imagining what the staff were like. It's probably for the best that we never went inside.
___karim 8y ago
It’s great to see smart new inventions being made when programmers switch to a, seemingly, extremely low-tech business. Are there more examples of programmers who made a similar leap?
altotrees 8y ago
Stories like these are the ones that inspire me the most. People using technology in a way that helps them in their everyday lives, or in a hobbyist fashion. I feel like many of the things I pick-up at work are out of career necessity: the latest framework, bits of an up and coming language that is going to be "the future", semi fluency in a stack so I can aid in a project,I enjoy it, but I don't enjoy it like in the same way I once did. Probably my favorite programming memory was teaching myself Java as a teenager and building games for my friends and I to play. No responsibility, if they worked...great, if not oh well. It was exhilarating. I do not think programming will ever become a lingua franca, as stated in other places here. I think hobbyist programmers may pop up more and more,or people who know enough to build small tools for themselves (not to scale) and I don't think that's a bad thing.
- abakker 8y ago
  As one of those hobbyists, I can say that the thing I wish most for was an easier way of "getting started". I mostly hack around in python, or arduino c, but I really wish that it was easier to write a script and actually give it to someone else, and actually have it run. The feature I like most about excel, is that it is practically ubiquitous. If I give someone else an excel toy workbook that does something, they can run it without needing to "manage the environment". If I write something in Python/numpy/pandas/Jupyter, it is actually pretty difficult to make it useful to anyone. Portability just makes the whole hobby programming thing much more fun.
  - jrib 8y ago
    Depending on what you're doing, a webapp is a great way to deal with the portability issue
    - abakker 8y ago
      yeah, I hear that, and I also know in my heart that it's right, but I have no business running access control/distributing my code/or hosting it for public consumption. Mostly a "hey, look at this data analysis" or "this is a good way to do this process" kind of things. emailing someone a file was a pretty good workflow for the low-volume script problem. I wish I could just get a python sandbox for GitHub and have them run it all for me.
ohnoabigshark 8y ago
Former CS major, current chef/owner checking in. Restaurants feel pretty ripe for voice assistants/AR but unfortunately lack the necessary technological and financial capital to make it happen, imo. Being able to record and retrieve important information without stopping your work (pulling up and scaling a recipe while chopping onions, for example) saves an immense amount of time in the kitchen. This is especially true during a busy service when circumstances and priorities can change quickly and without warning. The need is there, my question lies in whether an industry with tight profit margins can afford to pay for such a product.
- perlgeek 8y ago
  I guess one of the main challenges is making things reliable. Voice assistants in their current form in loud, stressful environments sound like a source of endless frustration. > The need is there, my question lies in whether an industry with tight profit margins can afford to pay for such a product. If it actually saves time and helps fulfill orders quicker, why not?
  - ohnoabigshark 8y ago
    This is true. I have tried wearing a mic to help with this and have seen some success. When I say afford to pay, I'm thinking of all the development time that has to go into it to make a viable product. I do believe it is possible and honestly hope to be the person to do it. Even if I'm not, I hope someone does because there is plenty of potential beyond what I'm trying to do.
- iraldir 8y ago
  Not a chef or anything, but wouldn't reliability be absolutely necessary with no mistake whatsoever? I mean, when I ask alexa to play a song, and she gives me the wrong one, it's cute. If in a restaurant you order 500 kilos of flower instead of 500 kilos of flour, that's more problematic (except maybe on valentine's day). Same goes for any sort of vocal "note" you would like to make. if it has to be absolutely reliable, I gotta think that voice recognition is not there yet.
Teichopsia 8y ago
Is there anyone else who has written software for bakeries / bread makers?
- geekbread 8y ago
  Former bread baker turned programmer here, I wrote a crude side project app a while ago called geekbread http://geekbread.com/ http://geekbread.com/. It just does basic bread formulas. There is definitely a lack of good baking software in the industry. all the spreadsheets I saw when I worked were overly complicated and error-prone. Maybe one day I can expand on the app and work with some bakers on it :)
yingw787 8y ago
I wonder if there's room for a software deployment model for SMBs. Create a GUI on top of Ansible so customers can configure their build, build/deploy a software tarball to a VM, and provide data and code migration tools to your local community colo - all open source. Company offers upgrades, security patches, operations/customer support, and occasionally new features - no mandatory subscription fees, no forced cloud-native stack, and no VCs demanding 20x returns. Something friendlier to programs than Microsoft Excel and XP, and friendlier to SMBs and end users than Slack and G-Suite. Almost like a neighborhood Red Hat, with shims for toy shops, bakeries, and bookstores. I think a bootstrapper could pull it off, or a small team of two/three funded by a friendly angel.
drieddust 8y ago
I keep coming back to Emacs reading these stories but it never became a habit primarily I have to work across many desktops/laptops computers with Windows & Linux as well as Android mobile. Emacs not being usable on mobile is a big problem and biggest roadblock in the path.
- ams6110 8y ago
  I can't imagine editing any document longer than a sentence or two on mobile, regardless of the editor.
- zeveb 8y ago
  Emacs runs on Windows as well as Linux (& on macOS, too). It works fine on the terminal in Android, but you'll want a keyboard, too. In principle you could add special Android bindings for emacs which would make using it without a keyboard somewhat useful.
  - drieddust 8y ago
    A mobile interface for Emacs will be killer. I heard about Orgazly and tried using it but it's a very slow interface. A mobile first design even with limited features will go a long way. Mobileorg was that app for a while but it's development stopped and it's no longer usable.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Agreed. Don't forget about tablets too; I'd happily pay for someone to make Emacs usable with touch gestures and optimized for touch use (e.g. with a clickable, context-aware button row).
      - taude 8y ago
        I'm waiting for Emacs to run natively on ChromeOS (or Android) so I can get a Chromebook. (I'm not willing to install Cruton or any of the native Linux hacks on a chromebook).
paddy_m 8y ago
I'm trying to help my girlfriend manage the inventory for her cactus business. She raises cacti from seed, cuttings, but mostly from wholesale suppliers. She has a square account and store. I’m trying to set up inventory tracking for her. There are couple of things that make her business different than most inventory holding businesses. 1. Generally her inventory increases in value over time because it grows. Over time a plant will grow from a smaller pot to a larger pot, plants in large pots sell for more. 2. She wants to track which suppliers provide better quality plants (do the plants die quickly?). She also wants to track how fast different plants grow. I could pretty easily write a django app that tracks this stuff. Any recommendations for a platform I could build on top of (airtable? google forms+sheets?). Maybe some type of marketing automation platform. Custom business apps are tricky. As a programmer it's easy to turn my nose up at excel based solutions, but I totally see how they end up being built.
- cascom 8y ago
  Talk about organic growth
- wbl 8y ago
  Don't knock Microsoft Access for this sort of thing.
  - obtaniumstool 8y ago
    Good point -- Access is a great middle ground between kludging something together in a spreadsheet and writing an entire app from scratch.
    - alexchamberlain 8y ago
      I'm sure this exists, but it's probably about time we had a GUI you can put in front of a Postgres/MySQL server in a similar way to Access forms, as a kind of hybrid between niche app and off the shelf.
      - 8y ago
magicnmonkey 8y ago
I use Datamine, to run ecom store over WhatsApp. Why is it so special to use Emacs?
dutchblacksmith 8y ago
Nice, I like it a lot!
burger_moon 8y ago
I'm going to be the unfortunate hater, but it sounds like he should spend more time on actually learning how to be a baker and less time writing code in this particular case. This is what I'd imagine most of the people on here would fall into the trap of when the monthly 'I want to quit and work with my hands' post comes up. It's the cliche, I want to disrupt the industry before I even learn it. My girlfriend works at a bakery and I showed her this post and asked her what she thought about it. None of the bakers need to write down anything or make spreadsheets on how to make a loaf of bread or any of the other products they make every day. This is like having to google 'how to write a for loop' even though you're a programmer. Bakeries make the same things every day, there's very little change even though as a customer(me) it might look crazy. Knowing recipes and quantities and how to adjust them are the most basic requirements of the job. Huge props to this guy for doing it though! I hate making negative posts shitting on someones venture. If this is what makes it more fun for him, then keep doing it, and get better.
- hnarn 8y ago
  Every single person that I've met that is a huge fan of Emacs has also had a tendency to get stuck in the technical aspects of things rather than seeing the bigger (non-technical) picture. This isn't meant as flame bait, I genuinely mean that these people have all been very intelligent, but they have all shared this peculiar quirk of absolutely over-engineering things to the point where it's kind of amusing. Your comment made me think that this is exactly how that kind of person would approach baking.
- kazinator 8y ago
  I don't think he's doing anything that a large scale bakery wouldn't also do, just on a smaller scale. I mean, some outfit that ships baked goods to retail stores all over a metropolitan area. They need to control parameters of the production process to ensure consistency at scale, plus handle all the logistics of scheduling all the processes and delivery.
- d0mine 8y ago
  May be you got it backwards: people who can't deal with numbers have to stick to the same routine. They can't afford the flexibility, the optimization.
euroclydon 8y ago
Using emacs with 7 million keyboard shortcuts to accidentally press, and then... lisp!! No thanks. This would be more approachable in an Anaconda notebook.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Your loss. (Also, Org Mode beats the crap out of Anaconda/Jupyter notebooks. You can still code Python, but the interface is actually ergonomic.)
  - pdcawley 8y ago
    It. Doesn’t. Matter. Use the too, you’re comfortable in and you’ll be way more productive than dropping everything to learn something new. Do that when the limitations of your current tool start to grate on you.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Well, parent's arguments were kind of dumb. "OMG keyboard and lisp" is not the same as saying that one can achieve the same thing in a tool one's more comfortable with. > Use the too, you’re comfortable in and you’ll be way more productive than dropping everything to learn something new. That's not true, and this kind of thinking can be dangerous to your productivity - especially if the tool you're comfortable in is one of the new breeds of popular applications or SaaS. Each tool has a productivity ceiling. Software like Emacs or Vim has that ceiling somewhere in the stratosphere; a typical web-based tool has the ceiling ridiculously low, barely letting you stand up. On that spectrum, dropping everything and learning a tool that gives you more space to grow does pay off very quickly.
  - euroclydon 8y ago
    Actually I use org-mode. I could implement what the blog suggests pretty quickly. But... A blog post aimed at bakers... Highlighting Emacs... OK.
- taude 8y ago
  Accidentally pressing anything in Emacs is easily resolved by pressing CTRL-G (cancel buffer command), or CTRL-/ (undo), though.... I agree the LISP thing would be a deal break for a lot of people.
jedberg 8y ago
This reminds me of the time I used Python to fill out my Wife's 4th grade report cards. She kept all the records in google sheets, so when it came time to do report cars, she already knew what all the grades should be. But the school only provided a terrible app where you literally had to make three clicks with a mouse to enter each grade. Each kid had about 20 grades to enter, and there were 30 kids. That was a lot of clicking and a lot of RSI. The app had no import/export, but it turned out you could save your work in progress to a proprietary file format. I figured out the format, and then figured out how to basically take the data in google sheets and munge it into the save file format. It took about 3 hours to enter all the grades manually, and it took about 3 hours to develop the app. So for the first time we used it, it was a wash, but then we got to use it twice more. Sadly, then they changed report card programs and the new one used a binary file format. At least the new program allowed keyboard input with shortcuts, so it wasn't as a bad.
- FredFS456 8y ago
  Rewrite the output logic with PyAutoGUI doing the keyboard shortcuts and grade typing? https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
  - jedberg 8y ago
    If she were still teaching I’d have put in more effort, but alas she retired when my daughter was born.
    - copperx 8y ago
      Tangential question, but how did she get pregnant at retirement age?
      - jedberg 8y ago
        LOL she was 36. When I say retired I mean "quit with no intention of going back to work". :) But more specifically, science! We used IVF.
gglitch 8y ago
Is there a name for small(ish), self-contained programming environments that offer optional but well-coupled guis/tuis? I realize this is a gray area, because someone will point out that Tk and SQLite can be slapped on basically anything; but I'm thinking of systems more like Hypercard, Tiddlywiki, Jupyter, Org-mode, even Racket or Picolisp. Edit: I should clarify that when I say "small(ish)," I'm referring to the number of discretely moving pieces and dependencies, not to, e.g., the size of a binary, or how many batteries are included, etc.
omouse 8y ago
This is basically why I end up going back to Emacs. It's waaaaay too easy to start writing functions and the built-in help system (with docstrings almost everywhere for every function and variable) is invaluable. Though I'm beginning to wonder if JavaScript-based extensions in VS Code can match the power of Emacs code. Are there plugins that connect to Postgres? or do what Org-mode does?
- mr_overalls 8y ago
  I know it's an oft-repeated gripe here, but Javascript has so many bizarre warts that I'd never trust it to configure my personal computing environment. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
  - omouse 8y ago
    With TypeScript it's basically like Emacs-Lisp in terms of the volume of warts, if not in the same space of bizarreness.
    - 5166cc9c39fa61 8y ago
      I would take elisp over TypeScript any day. The tooling around TypeScript is hot garbage, debugging async code is a huge time waster, and things that are trivial with dynamic binding turn into major undertakings because of the module system. Also the verbosity and reams of boilerplate.
- zokier 8y ago
  > Are there plugins that connect to Postgres? Seems so. https://github.com/Borvik/vscode-postgres https://github.com/Borvik/vscode-postgres
- taude 8y ago
  There is a watered down version of org-mode for VSCode. I still prefer the Emacs variety, though. Especially once you tweak out org-capture and custom templates....
redsavagefiero 8y ago
A little bit of know how goes a long way towards process improvement. When you have what process improvement looks like forced down your throat, mostly contrary to common sense, is when you know you work in enterprise software.
thatthatis 8y ago
If anybody is looking for an industry to disrupt: manufacturing, inventory, and logistics software is a complete disaster right now. I pay $X,XXX a year for manufacturing software, and I just had to write software like OP for my own company. The software I buy can turn product demand into ingredients and orders. But it can’t do it into the future. So I had to write custom software to take a sales forecast, turn it into a production forecast, and then turn this into a purchasing forecast. Seems like something that should be a solved problem, but not really.

465 points by flocial 8y ago

This is pretty cool to see. I frequently about how much most businesses could do if they just has a database to back there core business operations.

perlgeek 8y ago
That's pretty much part of my job :-) I work at a German IT outsourcing company that builds and runs its own datacenters (but also provides SaaS, ISP services, domains, the whole shenanigans). We have a central database that was started basically at the same time as the company itself, and now covers asset management, semi-automatic billing, network management (and much more) but is also used to generate configuration for mail servers, web servers, DNS servers, radius, DHCP, etc. Recently, topics such as revenue forecasts and being useful in compliance audits have become more important. I like to think that this central database has played a part in the steady growth and success of the company, but it's hard to say without doing controlled experiments (to which leadership would most likely object :D).

dsr_ 8y ago

It's a pity that I read the title first, because when I read the recursive descriptions I immediately thought about a Makefile that emitted directions, cumulative timing, and optional ingredient debit entries for an ordering system. But SQL is OK.

seanwilson 8y ago

> The key insight is that a bakery formula is so cliched that it can be represented as data. Here’s the formula for seedy malt loaves: > Of course, that’s not the full set of formulae, because it doesn’t tell you how to make ‘Seedy malt dough’, but that’s just another formula, which consists of flour, water, starter, salt and a multiseed ‘soaker’, where the starter and the soaker are the results of other formulae, which are (finally) made from basic ingredients1. I did consider reaching for the object oriented hammer at this point, but thought that I might be able to do everything I needed without leaving SQL. There's no way you can do something similar with spreadsheets? The example wasn't in enough detail for me to understand why not. The jump from spreadsheet to SQL seems massive in terms of ease of use.

rpod 8y ago
Especially since org-mode has a built-in spreadsheet system that supports formulas written in emacs calc or even arbitrary elisp: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro...
- ams6110 8y ago
  I really should learn that. I often find myself maniupulating text data in emacs, turning it into CSV or something that I can then copy/paste into a spreadsheet for calculations.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    You should. It's surprisingly good. You won't get pivot tables (at least until someone codes them up, which isn't out of the question in Emacs community), but for regular calculations it's awesome. Here's a short intro: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro.... Here's some documentation: https://orgmode.org/manual/The-Spreadsheet.html https://orgmode.org/manual/The-Spreadsheet.html And if you feel that TBLFMs are getting unwieldy, here's a bunch of features I absolutely love: https://orgmode.org/manual/Advanced-features.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Advanced-features.html. Turning on an extra column lets you name columns and cells, and have Org Mode recalculate the table automatically on any change, instead of on explicit command.
    - rpod 8y ago
      I didn't know about calculation marks, thanks for sharing! I use org spreadsheets to keep track of my D&D party's character sheets, so this should definitely come in handy :)
rahimnathwani 8y ago
"There's no way you can do something similar with spreadsheets?" You can, but the author is using tools that are more familiar to him, and hence more productive for him. Just like when doing some quick and dirty analysis, some people will reach for Excel, some for R, some for Pandas. None of those people is wrong. Some people go too far the other way: spend too much time learning new tools, and not enough creating things of value.

mhd 8y ago

This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional. Sure, open source makes everything rather accessible from a monetary point of view, but you still have to learn things. I almost feel like in the past there were more attempts at making this accessible to the end user, HyperCard, dbase etc, even just BASIC on your 8-bit machine. Nowadays? Excel/Google Sheets for the most simple case, probably, but if you have to transfer data from/into there or present it differently? Web sites and GUIs aren't that easy, but it's what the users know. If your point of interaction with a computer is more bare-bones (eg a BASIC/DOS prompt), solutions feel closer, easier to grasp.

crispyambulance 8y ago
> This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional. One would simply make bread the same way as it has been done for 1000 years! Humans can understand ratios, write stuff down, plan for the future, etc all without org-mode in emacs, databases, and sometimes without even a calculator.
- pdcawley 8y ago
  Yup. Bakeries have been run using a pen and paper daybook and the master baker’s skill for centuries. But the calculations are still a pain in the arse, so automating that is a big win. The Bread Matters spreadsheet I based the database schema on was made by someone who was a baker, not a programmer, and for a fixed set of recipes, it’s brilliant. If I hadn’t known the rudiments of RDBMS design I’d have bitten the bullet, extended the sheet and grumbled every time I had to add a new formula.
- biztos 8y ago
  Down the street from me is a baker so good he doesn't even have any signage, you have to know it's there -- the line out the door at certain times might be a hint -- and as far as I can tell, other than punching in the prices in the minimum cash register required by law, they keep no records at the point of sale. I don't know if he keeps spreadsheets or even databases elsewhere -- I hope he does, as he's an amazing baker and works his butt off, and I hope he makes tons of money. But I really don't think he has any record of, say, whether Rye or Spelt sells out faster. (It all sells out every day.) So I wonder if there's some level of artistry where optimization might just be an annoying distraction.

w8rbt 8y ago

Great uplifting article. It's awesome to see a geek get ahead in business by using his/her favorite open-source tech tools.

black-tea 8y ago

I see that I'm not the only geek who likes baking. When I was a PhD student I seriously considered packing it all in and starting a bakery. I'd just discovered what seemed like the forgotten secret of good bread: time. At the that time in the UK most bakery bread was terrible and bread recipes in books or online called for short rises in warm places. I had to go back to older books to discover the secret. I would have been ahead of my time if I'd actually gone through with it. These days it seems that the secret is out again with recipes calling for 6+ hour rises. In the town I used to live there is a very successful artisan bakery now.

MycroftJones 8y ago
I notice recently that the hipsters over on Metafilter are trying to smear bread bakers as "brogrammers" and "neckbeards". What is wrong with them. And you are right about the rising time. I do an 8 hour rise. Doctor Carrie Reams said that the rising time breaks down the phytates which in turn releases the calcium into a form that the body can digest. 2 hour rise doesn't do that.

olalonde 8y ago

That's the most HN title I've seen in a while.

unwind 8y ago

Frustratingly thin on details about the actual bakery (perhaps not surprising since it's a blog series). All I could figure out is this Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/theloafery/ https://www.facebook.com/theloafery/. It seems he mainly sells at a market.

parkjon 8y ago
That's funny, I was wanting more details on the bakery as well. I'm wondering how much of a pay difference he's experiencing going from software developer to bakery owner.
- czbond 8y ago
  My longtime buddy owns two combination cafe/coffee shops/bakery (2 units total). He called me yesterday looking for an ecommerce strategy job (which he did previously) since the incredibly low wages, and long hours were enough.
- taude 8y ago
  I had a friend who owned a really popular food truck in the LA area. After a couple years he went back to IT work because he could make more with more reasonable hours.
- philsnow 8y ago
  It's nice to work with your hands and produce something, but the margins you can earn with your time are going to be an order of magnitude larger with a tech job than any job involving producing physical goods like bakery / coffee shop / brewery, unless you achieve a lot of scale (distributing your product to large chains or similar).
perlgeek 8y ago
Maybe try asking him on twitter? https://twitter.com/pdcawley https://twitter.com/pdcawley I've been following him for some time (met him IRL at a conference in Kiev, Ukraine), and he's generally friendly.

istjohn 8y ago

I have only ever been a tech hobbyist, but I have leveraged my Python skills in a similar way. I run a home cleaning service with my wife, and I started using Airtable to track clients, jobs, expenditures, employee hours, etc. The data entry became tedious due to having to make entries in multiple tables for each job, so I wrote a Python script to use a simple command line read-eval-print loop to collect job information and make entries in the appropriate Airtable tables through the Airtable API. I also use Python to produce paycheck stubs, do simple business data analysis, and email me leads from our website. A small tangent: I have recently become frustrated with the limitations of a command line interface (primarily the inability to display charts and graphs), but there is a dearth of solid alternatives. Both web frameworks and GUI frameworks add far too much complexity for a solo amateur developer to quickly iterate to meet a small business' needs. I would love to have a product that let me produce ugly but practical GUIs in Python without having to learn a big framework like PyQT or Django. EasyGUI comes close, but isn't quite good enough. For now, I update an HTML file to display graphical output in Python and use a Firefox extension to auto-refresh the page on changes.

ses1984 8y ago
If you're familiar with python, try jupyter notebooks.
photonios 8y ago
What about Tkinter? https://wiki.python.org/moin/TkInter https://wiki.python.org/moin/TkInter Very simple and maybe a bit limited, but quite easily extended with some libraries.
- istjohn 8y ago
  I've looked at it, but I would be writing hundreds of lines of code just for the interface, which would really slow me down. I really want to be able to focus on business logic and slap together a minimal interface in an hour or so. And unfortunately, I'm not able to code every day, so the more interface cruft I have to wade through, the longer it will take me to dig back into it in the future when I need to make changes. EasyGUI is built on top of TkInter but takes care of all the details to give you a handful of super-easy-to-use basic widgets. It would be perfect if it was just a little more finished.

vanous 8y ago

This. Being able to run easily selectable scripts on pieces of selected text in my editor is what keeps me in vim. Doing repeatable tasks, filling XML data, gosh, I even keep my odometer book in vim via small hacked together python script. People keep recommending things like Visual Studio Code, but I am yet to find a way to do it there... Is it even possible?

rekshaw 8y ago

As people flock to become programmers, as a population we will become increasingly technologically literate. Sooner or later we will enter an age where programming is as second nature as writing. Communication at the end of the day is a way to get people to understand what we want. Programming is very similar only directed at machines, and as machines continue to replace people in trivial (and not so trivial) tasks, that will be the lingua franca. And yes, it will be javascript.

sokoloff 8y ago
The population who currently struggles with its/it's and they're/their/there, basic (con)sequential logic, and even universal remotes is unlikely to become productive in anything like our current text-based languages. For this flocking to happen, it's going to look more like a spreadsheet, block language (Scratch-esque), or Hypercard type system than a text language. Even there, I don't expect it to become a mainstream activity.
netsharc 8y ago
I've read the assertion that the spreadsheet is the first "programming environment" for the general population, and I like the idea. Input some numbers into 2 or more cells and the most basic function would be that the output is the sum of these numbers, displayed in another cell. https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/ offers a drag and drop environment, although indeed the general public would not understand the nodes ("TCP, mqtt, websocket?"), if they could make it more general it would be "easy" to make branches, which is what an if-else-statement is.
intertextuality 8y ago
I think you have a biased outlook, to be honest. For every handful of programmers I know, I know at least 100 others who maybe can barely use their computer besides basic apps. Programming is still not intuitive (nor enjoyable) for the vast majority of people, and I believe it will stay that way.
- petercooper 8y ago
  Agreed, I think programming as a skill will follow a similar arc to automotive engineering. Early on it was highly specialized, but from the 50s-80s it was generally expected that you knew how to maintain your car and would do the basic jobs yourself (oil, tires, maybe even filters). But now? A lot of people now would even call out AAA to change a wheel.

ubermonkey 8y ago

I haven't read the article (yes, I know, sorry), but the headline reminded me of a donut shop here in Houston. I don't know if the sign is intentionally this way, or if the middle letter of the first word in the name fell off, leaving behind the short, horizontal mount point, but either way it amuses emacs folks a lot, because it appears to say: M-x Donuts Who among us hasn't wanted, at least once, to invoke that mode?

weavie 8y ago
This one? https://i.imgur.com/E4EkEMf.png https://i.imgur.com/E4EkEMf.png
- ubermonkey 8y ago
  The very one. It's on the northwest side of the city. This is funny to longtime Houstonian nerds, because that's the area where Compaq was, and where Digital was, and which is now HP I think. (?)
  - ddavis 8y ago
    Thanks for sharing! Unfortunately Emacs came into my life after I grew up and left Houston, but if I ever find myself up 249 while on a visit I'll be sure to stop in.
sevensor 8y ago
When I was a child, we would always drive past a particular convenience store on our way to my grandmother's house. At some point in history, it must have been called "Self Service Mart," but the first S had long since fallen off. I loved imagining what the staff were like. It's probably for the best that we never went inside.

___karim 8y ago

It’s great to see smart new inventions being made when programmers switch to a, seemingly, extremely low-tech business. Are there more examples of programmers who made a similar leap?

altotrees 8y ago

Stories like these are the ones that inspire me the most. People using technology in a way that helps them in their everyday lives, or in a hobbyist fashion. I feel like many of the things I pick-up at work are out of career necessity: the latest framework, bits of an up and coming language that is going to be "the future", semi fluency in a stack so I can aid in a project,I enjoy it, but I don't enjoy it like in the same way I once did. Probably my favorite programming memory was teaching myself Java as a teenager and building games for my friends and I to play. No responsibility, if they worked...great, if not oh well. It was exhilarating. I do not think programming will ever become a lingua franca, as stated in other places here. I think hobbyist programmers may pop up more and more,or people who know enough to build small tools for themselves (not to scale) and I don't think that's a bad thing.

abakker 8y ago
As one of those hobbyists, I can say that the thing I wish most for was an easier way of "getting started". I mostly hack around in python, or arduino c, but I really wish that it was easier to write a script and actually give it to someone else, and actually have it run. The feature I like most about excel, is that it is practically ubiquitous. If I give someone else an excel toy workbook that does something, they can run it without needing to "manage the environment". If I write something in Python/numpy/pandas/Jupyter, it is actually pretty difficult to make it useful to anyone. Portability just makes the whole hobby programming thing much more fun.
- jrib 8y ago
  Depending on what you're doing, a webapp is a great way to deal with the portability issue
  - abakker 8y ago
    yeah, I hear that, and I also know in my heart that it's right, but I have no business running access control/distributing my code/or hosting it for public consumption. Mostly a "hey, look at this data analysis" or "this is a good way to do this process" kind of things. emailing someone a file was a pretty good workflow for the low-volume script problem. I wish I could just get a python sandbox for GitHub and have them run it all for me.

ohnoabigshark 8y ago

Former CS major, current chef/owner checking in. Restaurants feel pretty ripe for voice assistants/AR but unfortunately lack the necessary technological and financial capital to make it happen, imo. Being able to record and retrieve important information without stopping your work (pulling up and scaling a recipe while chopping onions, for example) saves an immense amount of time in the kitchen. This is especially true during a busy service when circumstances and priorities can change quickly and without warning. The need is there, my question lies in whether an industry with tight profit margins can afford to pay for such a product.

perlgeek 8y ago
I guess one of the main challenges is making things reliable. Voice assistants in their current form in loud, stressful environments sound like a source of endless frustration. > The need is there, my question lies in whether an industry with tight profit margins can afford to pay for such a product. If it actually saves time and helps fulfill orders quicker, why not?
- ohnoabigshark 8y ago
  This is true. I have tried wearing a mic to help with this and have seen some success. When I say afford to pay, I'm thinking of all the development time that has to go into it to make a viable product. I do believe it is possible and honestly hope to be the person to do it. Even if I'm not, I hope someone does because there is plenty of potential beyond what I'm trying to do.
iraldir 8y ago
Not a chef or anything, but wouldn't reliability be absolutely necessary with no mistake whatsoever? I mean, when I ask alexa to play a song, and she gives me the wrong one, it's cute. If in a restaurant you order 500 kilos of flower instead of 500 kilos of flour, that's more problematic (except maybe on valentine's day). Same goes for any sort of vocal "note" you would like to make. if it has to be absolutely reliable, I gotta think that voice recognition is not there yet.

Teichopsia 8y ago

Is there anyone else who has written software for bakeries / bread makers?

geekbread 8y ago
Former bread baker turned programmer here, I wrote a crude side project app a while ago called geekbread http://geekbread.com/ http://geekbread.com/. It just does basic bread formulas. There is definitely a lack of good baking software in the industry. all the spreadsheets I saw when I worked were overly complicated and error-prone. Maybe one day I can expand on the app and work with some bakers on it :)

yingw787 8y ago

I wonder if there's room for a software deployment model for SMBs. Create a GUI on top of Ansible so customers can configure their build, build/deploy a software tarball to a VM, and provide data and code migration tools to your local community colo - all open source. Company offers upgrades, security patches, operations/customer support, and occasionally new features - no mandatory subscription fees, no forced cloud-native stack, and no VCs demanding 20x returns. Something friendlier to programs than Microsoft Excel and XP, and friendlier to SMBs and end users than Slack and G-Suite. Almost like a neighborhood Red Hat, with shims for toy shops, bakeries, and bookstores. I think a bootstrapper could pull it off, or a small team of two/three funded by a friendly angel.

drieddust 8y ago

I keep coming back to Emacs reading these stories but it never became a habit primarily I have to work across many desktops/laptops computers with Windows & Linux as well as Android mobile. Emacs not being usable on mobile is a big problem and biggest roadblock in the path.

ams6110 8y ago
I can't imagine editing any document longer than a sentence or two on mobile, regardless of the editor.
zeveb 8y ago
Emacs runs on Windows as well as Linux (& on macOS, too). It works fine on the terminal in Android, but you'll want a keyboard, too. In principle you could add special Android bindings for emacs which would make using it without a keyboard somewhat useful.
- drieddust 8y ago
  A mobile interface for Emacs will be killer. I heard about Orgazly and tried using it but it's a very slow interface. A mobile first design even with limited features will go a long way. Mobileorg was that app for a while but it's development stopped and it's no longer usable.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Agreed. Don't forget about tablets too; I'd happily pay for someone to make Emacs usable with touch gestures and optimized for touch use (e.g. with a clickable, context-aware button row).
    - taude 8y ago
      I'm waiting for Emacs to run natively on ChromeOS (or Android) so I can get a Chromebook. (I'm not willing to install Cruton or any of the native Linux hacks on a chromebook).

paddy_m 8y ago

I'm trying to help my girlfriend manage the inventory for her cactus business. She raises cacti from seed, cuttings, but mostly from wholesale suppliers. She has a square account and store. I’m trying to set up inventory tracking for her. There are couple of things that make her business different than most inventory holding businesses. 1. Generally her inventory increases in value over time because it grows. Over time a plant will grow from a smaller pot to a larger pot, plants in large pots sell for more. 2. She wants to track which suppliers provide better quality plants (do the plants die quickly?). She also wants to track how fast different plants grow. I could pretty easily write a django app that tracks this stuff. Any recommendations for a platform I could build on top of (airtable? google forms+sheets?). Maybe some type of marketing automation platform. Custom business apps are tricky. As a programmer it's easy to turn my nose up at excel based solutions, but I totally see how they end up being built.

cascom 8y ago
Talk about organic growth
wbl 8y ago
Don't knock Microsoft Access for this sort of thing.
- obtaniumstool 8y ago
  Good point -- Access is a great middle ground between kludging something together in a spreadsheet and writing an entire app from scratch.
  - alexchamberlain 8y ago
    I'm sure this exists, but it's probably about time we had a GUI you can put in front of a Postgres/MySQL server in a similar way to Access forms, as a kind of hybrid between niche app and off the shelf.
    - 8y ago

magicnmonkey 8y ago

I use Datamine, to run ecom store over WhatsApp. Why is it so special to use Emacs?

dutchblacksmith 8y ago

Nice, I like it a lot!

burger_moon 8y ago

I'm going to be the unfortunate hater, but it sounds like he should spend more time on actually learning how to be a baker and less time writing code in this particular case. This is what I'd imagine most of the people on here would fall into the trap of when the monthly 'I want to quit and work with my hands' post comes up. It's the cliche, I want to disrupt the industry before I even learn it. My girlfriend works at a bakery and I showed her this post and asked her what she thought about it. None of the bakers need to write down anything or make spreadsheets on how to make a loaf of bread or any of the other products they make every day. This is like having to google 'how to write a for loop' even though you're a programmer. Bakeries make the same things every day, there's very little change even though as a customer(me) it might look crazy. Knowing recipes and quantities and how to adjust them are the most basic requirements of the job. Huge props to this guy for doing it though! I hate making negative posts shitting on someones venture. If this is what makes it more fun for him, then keep doing it, and get better.

hnarn 8y ago
Every single person that I've met that is a huge fan of Emacs has also had a tendency to get stuck in the technical aspects of things rather than seeing the bigger (non-technical) picture. This isn't meant as flame bait, I genuinely mean that these people have all been very intelligent, but they have all shared this peculiar quirk of absolutely over-engineering things to the point where it's kind of amusing. Your comment made me think that this is exactly how that kind of person would approach baking.
kazinator 8y ago
I don't think he's doing anything that a large scale bakery wouldn't also do, just on a smaller scale. I mean, some outfit that ships baked goods to retail stores all over a metropolitan area. They need to control parameters of the production process to ensure consistency at scale, plus handle all the logistics of scheduling all the processes and delivery.
d0mine 8y ago
May be you got it backwards: people who can't deal with numbers have to stick to the same routine. They can't afford the flexibility, the optimization.

euroclydon 8y ago

Using emacs with 7 million keyboard shortcuts to accidentally press, and then... lisp!! No thanks. This would be more approachable in an Anaconda notebook.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Your loss. (Also, Org Mode beats the crap out of Anaconda/Jupyter notebooks. You can still code Python, but the interface is actually ergonomic.)
- pdcawley 8y ago
  It. Doesn’t. Matter. Use the too, you’re comfortable in and you’ll be way more productive than dropping everything to learn something new. Do that when the limitations of your current tool start to grate on you.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Well, parent's arguments were kind of dumb. "OMG keyboard and lisp" is not the same as saying that one can achieve the same thing in a tool one's more comfortable with. > Use the too, you’re comfortable in and you’ll be way more productive than dropping everything to learn something new. That's not true, and this kind of thinking can be dangerous to your productivity - especially if the tool you're comfortable in is one of the new breeds of popular applications or SaaS. Each tool has a productivity ceiling. Software like Emacs or Vim has that ceiling somewhere in the stratosphere; a typical web-based tool has the ceiling ridiculously low, barely letting you stand up. On that spectrum, dropping everything and learning a tool that gives you more space to grow does pay off very quickly.
- euroclydon 8y ago
  Actually I use org-mode. I could implement what the blog suggests pretty quickly. But... A blog post aimed at bakers... Highlighting Emacs... OK.
taude 8y ago
Accidentally pressing anything in Emacs is easily resolved by pressing CTRL-G (cancel buffer command), or CTRL-/ (undo), though.... I agree the LISP thing would be a deal break for a lot of people.

jedberg 8y ago

This reminds me of the time I used Python to fill out my Wife's 4th grade report cards. She kept all the records in google sheets, so when it came time to do report cars, she already knew what all the grades should be. But the school only provided a terrible app where you literally had to make three clicks with a mouse to enter each grade. Each kid had about 20 grades to enter, and there were 30 kids. That was a lot of clicking and a lot of RSI. The app had no import/export, but it turned out you could save your work in progress to a proprietary file format. I figured out the format, and then figured out how to basically take the data in google sheets and munge it into the save file format. It took about 3 hours to enter all the grades manually, and it took about 3 hours to develop the app. So for the first time we used it, it was a wash, but then we got to use it twice more. Sadly, then they changed report card programs and the new one used a binary file format. At least the new program allowed keyboard input with shortcuts, so it wasn't as a bad.

FredFS456 8y ago
Rewrite the output logic with PyAutoGUI doing the keyboard shortcuts and grade typing? https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- jedberg 8y ago
  If she were still teaching I’d have put in more effort, but alas she retired when my daughter was born.
  - copperx 8y ago
    Tangential question, but how did she get pregnant at retirement age?
    - jedberg 8y ago
      LOL she was 36. When I say retired I mean "quit with no intention of going back to work". :) But more specifically, science! We used IVF.

gglitch 8y ago

Is there a name for small(ish), self-contained programming environments that offer optional but well-coupled guis/tuis? I realize this is a gray area, because someone will point out that Tk and SQLite can be slapped on basically anything; but I'm thinking of systems more like Hypercard, Tiddlywiki, Jupyter, Org-mode, even Racket or Picolisp. Edit: I should clarify that when I say "small(ish)," I'm referring to the number of discretely moving pieces and dependencies, not to, e.g., the size of a binary, or how many batteries are included, etc.

omouse 8y ago

This is basically why I end up going back to Emacs. It's waaaaay too easy to start writing functions and the built-in help system (with docstrings almost everywhere for every function and variable) is invaluable. Though I'm beginning to wonder if JavaScript-based extensions in VS Code can match the power of Emacs code. Are there plugins that connect to Postgres? or do what Org-mode does?

mr_overalls 8y ago
I know it's an oft-repeated gripe here, but Javascript has so many bizarre warts that I'd never trust it to configure my personal computing environment. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
- omouse 8y ago
  With TypeScript it's basically like Emacs-Lisp in terms of the volume of warts, if not in the same space of bizarreness.
  - 5166cc9c39fa61 8y ago
    I would take elisp over TypeScript any day. The tooling around TypeScript is hot garbage, debugging async code is a huge time waster, and things that are trivial with dynamic binding turn into major undertakings because of the module system. Also the verbosity and reams of boilerplate.
zokier 8y ago
> Are there plugins that connect to Postgres? Seems so. https://github.com/Borvik/vscode-postgres https://github.com/Borvik/vscode-postgres
taude 8y ago
There is a watered down version of org-mode for VSCode. I still prefer the Emacs variety, though. Especially once you tweak out org-capture and custom templates....

redsavagefiero 8y ago

A little bit of know how goes a long way towards process improvement. When you have what process improvement looks like forced down your throat, mostly contrary to common sense, is when you know you work in enterprise software.

thatthatis 8y ago

If anybody is looking for an industry to disrupt: manufacturing, inventory, and logistics software is a complete disaster right now. I pay $X,XXX a year for manufacturing software, and I just had to write software like OP for my own company. The software I buy can turn product demand into ingredients and orders. But it can’t do it into the future. So I had to write custom software to take a sales forecast, turn it into a production forecast, and then turn this into a purchasing forecast. Seems like something that should be a solved problem, but not really.