Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

Dev.SN ♥ developers

What Do Soylents Do?

posted by LaminatorX on Monday March 17 2014, @02:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-story-of-us dept.

buswolley writes:

"Soylents: Concentrated pools of experts, doers, thinkers.

I am a neuroscientist.

What do you do?"

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
What Do Soylents Do? | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 1000 moderator points   | 157 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by tynin on Monday March 17 2014, @12:54PM

    by tynin (2013) on Monday March 17 2014, @12:54PM (#17695)

    Care to plug your software? I'd love to see what you have going for you. Software and coffee, a match made in heaven, sounds interesting.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by N3Roaster on Monday March 17 2014, @02:09PM

    by N3Roaster (3860) on Monday March 17 2014, @02:09PM (#17732) Homepage

    Sorry, there's a link in my bio but it's better to have that in the comment itself. The software is called Typica. I started work on that in 2006 with version 1.0 released in 2007. Rather ugly project page [randomfield.com], github [github.com] for the latest source code, and there are some videos that show some different aspects of the software [youtube.com] as well.

    The software is still under active development with more improvements that I'd like to make than time available to make them. I'm using Qt to handle a lot of things on the UI side and PostgreSQL to store the data. Most people just run PostgreSQL and Typica on the same machine, but I have my database on another computer on the LAN and connect to that from multiple other systems (so I can do things like have multiple roasters in operation working off the same inventory records).

    There are a number of options in this space and things are a little bit better now, but when I started to work on this the options that existed were expensive, Windows only (we were a Mac/Linux shop at the time), and as near as I could tell they all had what I considered to be severe design flaws with things like artificial limitations on the number of saved roasting plans you could have and no regard for integration with other aspects of the business.

    Being in control of my software has also let me develop new features and try out different things with the result that I've made it easier for me to operate consistently without compromising on quality or the versatility of the underlying equipment. Some of these features have since been added in some form to commercial offerings, but most of the software in this space is not being written by people who share the direct practical concerns of people using the software so there's often some communication difficulty getting things implemented in a way that's useful and sometimes business concerns for the software vendor have also resulted in sub-optimal approaches. That's not to say that my software is the right choice for every roasting company (it's not), but I try to focus my efforts on things that I'm going to find useful myself and that seems to be working out.

    --
    (mostly) coffee videos [youtube.com]