User interface design is a tricky beast. It’s part art and part science…not programming. The fact that the majority UIs suck, to me, speaks to how hard it is to design a good UI. With our 4-input Data Bridge, there are some tough UI issues which we need to tackle. Read more…
One thing that our system doesn’t do very well, or at all, is deal with blends. Your inventory consists of “beans” which you can name as you wish and have a country of origin. In the case of a blend, right now we simply give you the liberty to name Read more…
Designing data visualizations is a real art. Taking a set of data, be in numerical or not, and turning it into something which people can look at and immediately understand or get a grasp of is no easy task. This Venn Diagram of The Muppets is simple, obvious and provide Read more…
About a week ago, without much fanfare, we added a new feature to the RoastLog website. If you’ve been following us on Twitter you can probably guess what I’m talking about. It’s not a huge change but we think it could have pretty large implications in the way that roasters Read more…
We usually send these updates directly to our users via email, but thought blogging about the updates going on over here may be interesting to a wider audience. This past Friday, when the rest of the coffee world was (hopefully) getting some rest and relaxation, we rolled out about a Read more…
Ted’s last blog post on the future of coffee cupping was very well-timed. In the latest issue of Roast Magazine, there’s a great pair of articles which take two stances on the numeric scoring system which is found throughout the specialty coffee industry: http://bit.ly/bOUXXk The first article, by Shawn Steinman Read more…
This past Thursday, at approximately 3:30 pm Pacific Time, we experienced out first site outage. I set up some basic monitoring through Pingdom which checks that our site is online and healthy every five minutes. I got an email at about 3:30 alerting me that there was a problem. At Read more…
In terms of the questions we get regarding RoastLog, the one we get most often isn’t even about RoastLog, per se. The one area of complication for our system, and any temperature measuring system, is how exactly to accurately and precisely measure what you’re interested in. In our case, that’s Read more…
So, here’s the thing… There are great piles of terrible, hard to use, unpleasant software applications in the world. No doubt, you use some of them every day. Anyone adore Microsoft Word? QuickBooks? Hopefully you’ve been spared the incredible disaster that is Lotus Notes. “Programmers, deep in their thoughts of Read more…
One of the great things about the coffee industry in general, and about coffee roasters specifically, is the type of people who are attracted to the trade. You are just as likely to see a musician or a sculptor standing next to a roaster as you are a former electrical Read more…