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.
You have a point. If I were doing higher volumes at retail, the thought process would be much simpler. Make up a 60% starter on 8kg of flour in the evening. In the morning, empty a 16kg sack of flour into the mixer, chuck in 500g of salt and 12kg of water at an appropriate temperature to finish at 21C. Mix on first speed for to a shaggy mess (about five minutes), then about 8 minutes on second speed to moderate gluten development. Bulk ferment in a cool part of the bakehouse for 3 hours, with 3 folds 40 minutes apart, scale off large and small loaves, shape, prove until slightly underproved (4.5–6 hours) then retard overnight. Back in the bakery at 4 the next morning and, bake everything off and get it to market by 8am.
But today, my customers want 9 large multigrain loaves, 4 small ones, 3 really small soup bowl loaves, a dozen large white sours, 5 small and a couple of dozen bun loaves. On Friday they will want substantially different quantities. If I want to keep selling 95–100% of everything I bake, then I need accurate quantities, and I’d rather offload that essentially trivial calculation on a tool that gets it right every time. Five minutes after I arrive in the bakehouse, I have an accurate production sheet with the right quantities on it and I can concentrate on the far more important task of actually making the bread. I’ve spent maybe a couple of days, over the last year and a bit implementing the production planning software. Time well spent, I reckon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.