Building the ultimate software tools for specialty coffee

Our first site outage

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 the same time, some error emails started arriving in my Inbox.  Apparently, the master database was not happy and our application could not connect to that machine.  I tried logging Read more…

By brianz, ago

Dedicated to Perpetual Improvement

If you are reading this blog, chances are you know that RoastLog is a continually evolving system of tools designed specifically for coffee professionals. From the very start we planned to keep developing and improving the RoastLog system with the goal of making the lives of coffee professionals easier. We recognize that coffee roasters, cuppers, brokers and other coffee professionals often do not have the technology tools needed to make the work we do simpler. We make do with spread Read more…

By ted, ago

Thermocouples, and beyond!

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 your coffee. There are many different ways to measure temperature: an old mercury thermometer from when you were a kid, infrared devices, RTD, etc.  Once which had been around for Read more…

By brianz, ago

RoastLog is better

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 algorithms and code, ‘design’ user interfaces the same way that miners ‘design’ the landscape with their cavernous pits and enormous tailing piles. The software interface design process alternates between the Read more…

By ryan, ago

Our first policy change

When Ted, Ryan and I got together and started working on RoastLog, it was very clear from the beginning that we all wanted to form a company which treated its customers like people with valid and important feedback, rather than like people who just paid us.  Our whole product is born from our conversations with roasters, and hearing them tell us what they’d like to see. Nowadays, it seems like everything online is becoming social.  Twitter and Facebook are household Read more…

By brianz, ago

SCAA, Best New Product Award & Shout Outs

The last few weeks have been kind of a blur for team RoastLog. Over two years of dreaming, designing and building, culminated in creation of the first official version of RoastLog available to the world’s roasting community. Many hours of sleep we sacrificed in order to bring RoastLog online in time for the annual conference of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. At about two AM on April 15th, we flipped the switch and launched the website. The following day Read more…

By ted, ago

We’re live!

It’s official….last night at approximately 2am, roastlog.com officially came online. We’re at the SCAA convention right now, setting up and getting ready for the convention to open tomorrow.  If you’re at the show, come by and say hi. We’re pretty excited about our official launch…hopefully you are too.  If you still have questions after reading the “tour” and “about” pages on our site, shoot us an email. Thanks to everyone for their encouraging words along the way, and to all Read more…

By brianz, ago

Riding the wave

Here we are, less than a week away from the 2010 SCAA conference.  One year ago, I determined that this was the deadline…..RoastLog had to go from a really rough prototype to a real business with a real product by SCAA 2010.  I remember that plane ride home from Atlanta.  I opened up the MacBook Pro and started reorganizing code, starting to get ready for what I knew was coming soon. Today, one year later, I can confidently say that Read more…

By brianz, ago

Coffee Technology and the Cognoscenti

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 engineer or carpenter. The diversity in our industry makes it incredibly dynamic, since varied interests bring so many unique perspectives to the product we all work with. Over the last Read more…

By ted, ago

Where oh where have we gone?

I hate blog posts about how stale the blog has become….but this is sort of going to be like that. It’s been two and a half weeks since we’ve posted any updates here, which is longer than we’d like.  However, the reason for this is not because we’re slacking off, it’s because we’ve been slammed with getting our product ready for its public debut.  The past month has been a lot of this…..sitting in the home office at 12:30am. I’m Read more…

By brianz, ago