
Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL - flocial
https://bofh.org.uk/2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/
======
altotrees
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
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
Depending on what you're doing, a webapp is a great way to deal with the
portability issue

~~~
abakker
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.

~~~
ofrzeta
Jupyter notebooks could be a way to do what you want:
[https://jupyter.org/try](https://jupyter.org/try)

------
jedberg
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
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
If she were still teaching I’d have put in more effort, but alas she retired
when my daughter was born.

~~~
copperx
Tangential question, but how did she get pregnant at retirement age?

~~~
jedberg
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.

------
ubermonkey
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
This one?

[https://i.imgur.com/E4EkEMf.png](https://i.imgur.com/E4EkEMf.png)

~~~
ubermonkey
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
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.

------
mhd
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.

~~~
0x445442
Can't remember where I read the story, Steve Yegge perhaps. But they were
talking about how where they worked secretaries actually used Emacs apps
developed by the IT department and, over time, the secretaries started to
extend the apps with Elisp.

~~~
Spooky23
Tech people have a problem with assuming that everyone is an idiot, mostly
because it’s easier to do half-assed work aimed at a moron.

Legacy text based solutions that survived are usually much better designed by
people who actually spoke to the users.

~~~
Swalden123
The thing that has irritated me often is not that people are idiots but they
often lack of self belief that they could learn to do something. The key here
is the secretaries didn’t realise they were learning to code, but if you told
them to learn to code they would most likely make excuses.

~~~
Spooky23
Of course.

You pay your admin $18/hr and pay a programmer $50. People tend to assume
their place.

------
paddy_m
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.

~~~
jwr
> 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.

Both of these are true. And most people do not appreciate how tricky niche
apps are. When I started writing PartsBox (for myself initially, later grew it
into a business at [https://partsbox.io/](https://partsbox.io/)) several years
ago, I thought I'd be done in a weekend. Nearly 4 years and almost 3000
commits later…

Spreadsheets are a pain for anything but the simplest things. And yet they are
useful to a point, because making a domain-specific application is
surprisingly hard: there are lots of edge cases that you don't think about
initially.

~~~
fipar
This reminded me of the following from The Tao of Programming[0]:

"There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of
Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an
accounting package or an operating system?"

"An operating system," replied the programmer.

The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package
is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said.

"Not so," said the programmer, "When designing an accounting package, the
programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how
it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the
tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside
appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the
simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is
easier to design."

The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. "That is all good and well, but which is
easier to debug?"

The programmer made no reply."

[0]: [http://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html](http://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html)

------
istjohn
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.

~~~
photonios
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
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.

------
rekshaw
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.

~~~
intertextuality
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
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Cheap tyre iron included with your vehicle vs nuts over-tightened with
commercial pneumatic wrench ... it's not that unlikely that the tyre-iron
breaks. If it doesn't you may be unable to loosen the nuts. It's pretty
reasonable to call out a mechanic.

If you're doing anything complicated you have to wrangle the vehicle computer.

I expect you're right, computers will get more complex, more proprietary, less
open, less likely to use open standards, companies will do more to prevent
users adapting or repairing them.

------
seanwilson
> 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.

~~~
rahimnathwani
"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.

~~~
kiallmacinnes
There is a downside to this though .. For this bakery, if you hire someone,
theres a reasonable chance they can use a spreadsheet (maybe not add new
recipes etc, but use..). I'd bet is very unlikely the same will be true of SQL
and emacs.

In tech/development, it's akin to someone building a system in some obscure
language, because they are most productive and the only ones developing it
today.. It's likely that system will end up being entirely replaced if the
team maintaining it grows.

(To be clear, I'm not saying the Bakery made a bad choice, or what using
obscure languages is a bad choice, or that optimising for immediate
productivity through familiar - to you - tools is bad.. just that there is
lots to think about when building a new system..)

~~~
whynotminot
This is a very important point.

Choose tools that are: (1) right for the project (2) right for the current
team (3) right for the future team

(3) might be hard given you don't know who joins later, and the engineers
might also not have a say if they're not involved in hiring. But you can
generally make decent guesses. The odds of the next baker you higher knowing
SQL and emacs? Pretty low... the odds they know Excel? Probably higher.

With that said, this was still fun. I enjoy seeing technology used in
interesting ways, even if I don't think it's necessarily the most sustainable
way to do something.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _The odds of the next baker you higher knowing SQL and emacs? Pretty low...
> the odds they know Excel? Probably higher._

Odds that you can teach them the basics of SQL and Emacs? Pretty high. At the
level needed here, it's just UI like any other. _Journalists_ are routinely
taught SQL as a part of their studies, and secretaries and writers are known
to use Emacs.

As for your points for tech projects, I really dislike the emphasis on (3). It
sounds reasonable from business perspective, but business is always hoping for
candidates who already know everything they need to be 100% productive from
day one. It's an impossibility, and structuring your workshop around such
requirements only drags your project down - because instead of using the right
tool for the job, you end up using the lowest common denominator tool.

It's kind of like refusing to use excavators, because not everyone knows how
to operate them, but everyone knows how to use a shovel and shovel wielders
are cheaper.

~~~
seanwilson
> > The odds of the next baker you higher knowing SQL and emacs? Pretty low...
> the odds they know Excel? Probably higher.

> Odds that you can teach them the basics of SQL and Emacs? Pretty high.

Have you ever tried to teach a regular person how to use Excel? The above
reads like satire if I'm honest. Even teaching someone how to use Emacs alone
would be seriously pushing it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I do teach non-tech people computer stuff from time to time in professional
capacity, including in the past the Microsoft Office suite, as well as
Photoshop, Corel and Inkscape. So I do have a concept of how difficult that
is.

That said, in context of work, it's even simpler. A few tasks, a program. You
teach people by example. Type this here, type this there, do this, do that,
you're done. Nothing hard.

Think of it this way: almost every company that uses computers has some custom
assortment of SMB tools and SaaS websites specific to the job at hand. It's
normal that people learn this, and they have zero problems with it. Hell,
typical ecommerce management panels I see people working in have UX an order
of magnitude worse than Emacs.

------
estsauver
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
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).

------
omouse
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
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
With TypeScript it's basically like Emacs-Lisp in terms of the volume of
warts, if not in the same space of bizarreness.

~~~
5166cc9c39fa61
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.

------
w8rbt
Great uplifting article. It's awesome to see a geek get ahead in business by
using his/her favorite open-source tech tools.

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

------
unwind
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
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.

~~~
philsnow
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).

------
drieddust
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I used to run separate Emacs instances on both Windows and Linux, but these
days I settled for a different workflow. I keep my main Emacs running on my
home Linux desktop. From other computers and locations, I just SSH to the
desktop and run an Emacs frame in terminal mode (the command is just:
emacsclient -t). Turns out, this is usable for about 95% of things I use Emacs
for (the remaining 5% are when I need to view a picture or a PDF, which
obviously won't show in terminal). Hell, if you configure your terminal/SSH
client to run in 256-color mode, the resulting terminal Emacs will be nearly
indistinguishable from the GUI one!

That's one of many hidden strengths of Emacs-based workflow - it works the
same whether you're running in GUI mode, or connecting remotely with text
terminal. That also means I can work on heavy projects from my underpowered
2-in-1 netbook :).

~~~
philsnow
I have done this before but I like going one step further and running Emacs
over X with xpra or similar. An annoyance with xpra in particular last I
looked into it is that the protocol version has to be identical on all your
machines or it just refuses to connect (it has no concept of
forwards/backwards compat in the wire protocol), and debian/ubuntu package
different versions, so you end up having to build it yourself locally
everywhere.

------
ohnoabigshark
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.

~~~
iraldir
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.

~~~
ohnoabigshark
This is very true. To combat the problem right now, I have some of my own
logic in the middle to correct common misappropriations. I also have a small
HUD-like tablet that shows me whatever I'm working on so I can see that the
info went in correctly. Your point is still correct: the tech isn't quite
there yet to do it without these other pieces.

------
dsr_
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.

------
gglitch
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.

------
burger_moon
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.

~~~
d0mine
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.

~~~
MrOwen
That's what I was thinking too. Perhaps this guy has greater aspirations for
his bakery and laying out the foundation like this from day 1 will enable him
to grow without many of the pains you might otherwise experience when
expanding your business.

~~~
pdcawley
Nah. I just have a tiny capacity and a very variable order book. If I baked
the same thing every day, the wastage would kill me.

~~~
flocial
Just wanted to say I remembered you from your rails blogging days (thanks for
those articles and code) and seeing this on r/emacs made me smile.

------
vanous
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?

------
yingw787
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.

------
thatthatis
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.

------
redsavagefiero
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.

------
___karim
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?

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

~~~
geekbread
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 :)

------
dutchblacksmith
Nice, I like it a lot!

------
black-tea
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
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.

------
magicnmonkey
I use Datamine, to run ecom store over WhatsApp.

Why is it so special to use Emacs?

------
euroclydon
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
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
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
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.

