zlacker

>>flocia+(OP)
> The key insight is that a bakery formula is so cliched that it can be represented as data. Here’s the formula for seedy malt loaves:

> Of course, that’s not the full set of formulae, because it doesn’t tell you how to make ‘Seedy malt dough’, but that’s just another formula, which consists of flour, water, starter, salt and a multiseed ‘soaker’, where the starter and the soaker are the results of other formulae, which are (finally) made from basic ingredients1. I did consider reaching for the object oriented hammer at this point, but thought that I might be able to do everything I needed without leaving SQL.

There's no way you can do something similar with spreadsheets? The example wasn't in enough detail for me to understand why not. The jump from spreadsheet to SQL seems massive in terms of ease of use.

>>seanwi+e9
"There's no way you can do something similar with spreadsheets?"

You can, but the author is using tools that are more familiar to him, and hence more productive for him.

Just like when doing some quick and dirty analysis, some people will reach for Excel, some for R, some for Pandas. None of those people is wrong.

Some people go too far the other way: spend too much time learning new tools, and not enough creating things of value.

>>rahimn+8a
I'm not saying it's the wrong approach, I'm saying I don't understand what the problem is. The initial example to motivate moving from a spreadsheet to SQL is only this:

    recipe ingredient quantity
    Small Seedy Malt Seedy malt dough .61 kg
    Large Seedy Malt Seedy malt dough .92 kg

Having to tinker with recipes in SQL sounds really bad as well compared to editing a spreadsheet even if you were an SQL expert.

>>seanwi+Ab
Yeah, he didn't explain that part well. Bakers typically have ingredients in terms of ratios with respect (usually) to the mass of the main flour. There could be up to a dozen ingredients (sometimes just 3) with time and temperature sensitive processes. A typical small artisinal bakery will have a repertoire of a couple dozen baked goods. It's a fair amount of stuff to keep track of especially when you throw planning/scheduling into the mix.

One doesn't need anything more than a notebook (a paper notebook that is) to do this stuff, but to each his own.

>>crispy+Uf
Yeah. Lots of hand waving in the piece because it was a choice between something I could write in a morning for a general audience or, frankly, not bothering to write anything at all.

A bakery formula is an acyclic directed graph running from top level “product” nodes (a loaf of bread, say) through one or more intermediate formulae until you reach basic ingredients. For a given set of orders, you need to work out how much of which ingredient to mix at each step in the process. If I were only working in, say six loaf batches, it’d probably be easier to use a ready reckoner approach, but it’s a tiny bakery and I’d rather not deal with the wastage so I only bake what’s ordered.

After about the third time I fucked up the pencil and paper calculations, I decided to automate (then at least the bad calculations were repeatable, and only needed fixing once).