Keeping Track of it All – part 1 of 3

A Google search for “coffee shortage” brings up a slew of results about expected green coffee shortfalls in the coming years. I’m not much for predictions. That guesswork is best left to the cable TV “news” shows. Even a fairly dark perspective on the next couple of years gets turned on it’s head if you view it like David Pohl from Equator Coffee and Tea – http://www.equatorcoffees.com/blog/?p=234 What is reasonable to expect, and what I start thinking about when I Read more…

Our 2010 blog in review

Here is the summary of our blog for its very first year.  Lesson learned, more celebrities! While we’re here, I may as well summarize 2010 for RoastLog.  In early January of 2010, we didn’t have a product.  We had a prototype circuit board, very very rough prototype which I had demo’ed at the previous year’s SCAA show and a few beta testers.  A year later we have 34 paying customers, a Best New Product award from the SCAA and almost Read more…

I’m seeing stars

A question came up recently from a couple of new RoastLog users about the way the profile curve was appearing in the RoastLogger client application. When a new user starts working with the system, the very first profile curve doesn’t initially display in a scale that makes sense. It’s easy to work around this behavior but we now realize that it is not obvious how. We’re going to resolve this issue in our next build of the client application so new users will Read more…

Searching for time

One thing the three of us struggle with on a daily basis over here is time.  RoastLog is a real business with real customers paying us real money.  However, the money we earn from RoastLog isn’t enough to pay the bills for one person, let alone three.  This means that all three of us have day jobs to feed our families, pay the mortgages and buy new iDevices.  This is both good and bad. It’s good because we don’t have Read more…

Data, data, data. Arrrrggghghh!

As Ted mentioned in his most recent post “Hard At Work, or an Update on the State of RoastLog” we are indeed hard at work on a number of things, including a 4-channel data bridge. Many, many roasters have expressed a desire for multiple inputs when data logging. In some cases we’ve heard it’s an absolute necessity – they wouldn’t even consider signing up for RoastLog without being able to log from multiple inputs. That’s all fine and understandable, but Read more…

Hard At Work, or an Update on the State of RoastLog

It’s hard for me to believe that Thanksgiving is less than a week away. I spent three weeks last month vacationing in Spain and the few weeks since then catching up with all the work that piled up while I was gone. Now it’s November, the eve of the busiest time of year for many in the coffee industry. Although RoastLog isn’t in the business of selling coffee we’re managing to keep ourselves pretty busy along with the rest of Read more…

Data Visualizations and The Muppets

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 values value to the user. Recently, I was re-acquainted with a project called code_swarm out of UC Davis.  This project aims at looking through the history of a software project Read more…

What is happening anyway?

Sitting in our weekly meeting. I’m up for a blog post but not overflowing with ideas. BZ asks, “So, what inspires you?” I reply, “Well, if you want to know what I find really inspiring I’ll tell you, but I’m not comfortable blogging about it.” Coffee is going through a really fantastic, interesting time. We’re unwrapping a thing we thought so familiar and going, “Holy shit! This is so much more interesting, amazing and fabulous than we knew.” A cup Read more…

MC Hammer drinks Ritual Coffee

Ok…maybe I should say, “MC Hammer *will* drink Ritual Coffee”. Now, the story behind the crazy blog title, and the photo. This past Saturday I went to Startup School, which is a one-day free seminar sponsored by the good folks at Y-Combinator.  Given that not everyone who reads this is a tech nerd in the Silicon Valley, Y-Combinator is a prominent start-up incubator here in the Bay Area.  They invest in start-ups, and mentor them to help get them going Read more…

Kona, a wedding and some coffee

I just returned from the big island of Hawaii where a few things happened.  First, and most importantly, Kristi and I got married.  Neither of us are into the big wedding thing, so it was just the two of us, Pinkie the wedding coordinator from the hotel, and our local officiant, Dard Aller.     Dard performed a beautiful traditional Hawaiian ceremony for us.  Everything was perfect…we really couldn’t have asked for anything more.  At then end of the ceremony, Read more…