Piers Cawley used to be a programmer. Now he’s a baker. Following a longtime dream, Cawley opened a bakery and is now happily turning out bread instead of code. Running a small bakery doesn’t seem to offer a lot of opportunities for software to help out other than the usual accounting type operations that any business needs. In a delightful post, Cawley shows that that isn’t true.
It’s easy to imagine that you just knead some dough, pop it in the oven, and a sometime later a loaf of bread appears. Of course, it’s much more complicated than that. A typical “baking” spans two days and exactly what happens depends on how big the order is. Just one example of the things to be considered is how much of each ingredient to include given the final amount of product. That’s basically a simple calculation, of course, that bakers have been making for millennia but it’s important to get it right so that you end up with a consistent product.
After messing up the calculations a few times, Cawley turned to his programming background to automate the process. His solution uses PostgreSQL to hold his recipes and other data and Org-mode and Babel to make and display the calculations. It is, in one sense, a trivial application but I love how he leverages two powerful software tools to solve a problem in an unexpected domain. At the end of the post, Cawley lists some enhancements that he’d like to make to the system.
It’s an interesting post and well worth a read if only to see how a programmer’s editor can help bake bread.