Welcome to roasting the developer! Here we answer the burning questions from roasters. One of the questions we get asked a lot is: when is the software going to be ready? And I confess that we are very far behind schedule. Thanks everyone for your patience.

So the burning question, what have we been doing all this time…

Support all the things

When we started we had a vision of supporting all the devices. We wanted to support roasters, temperature devices, multimeters. We wanted to be able to control roasters heating and cooling systems.

We wanted it all!

But our ambition got ahead of us.

And as we developed more integrations we realized most were not ready for production. The problem is, in hindsight, obvious. Supporting many different devices requires supporting many different protocols and interfaces. Some devices use USB, some use the network, some are serial connections, some use wi-fi etc etc.

Furthermore supporting a devices also means supporting it on both windows and Mac. And that makes supporting a device even more time consuming.

In the end we made the hard decision to focus on Phidgets. It wasnt’ easy for us but we’re very happy with the Phidgets integration. It is one of the best devices on the market.

This doesn’t mean we will never support other devices. It means for now the only device range we are supporting are Phidgets.

The downside for us was we lost a lot time. And as a small team that hurt a lot. Lesson learned, don’t let your ambition gets ahead of you.

Is there even a business…

This one has nagged at us for a long time. Is this business to specialized? What price would people actually pay? Would the business be sustainable?

So we set out to answer these questions. We listened to hundreds of roasters. We heard what you wanted, what problems you had. And they all sounded familiar. As I’ve gone through the same problems as a roaster myself.

We looked at our results. And I can say with absolute 100% confidence:

🤷

I have no idea.

It took a lot of time thinking and soul searching to come up with that. And I am none the wiser.

What I am sure of this there are lots of roasters who want to roast high quality coffee every batch. And we want to help you achieve those goals.

So we are just rolling the dice and taking our chances.

Lock it down 🔒

During conversations one of the surprising and common themes was security. Will my data be safe in the cloud?

So we started building out our infrastructure and tightening security in our cloud. We partnered up with Google to leverage their superior infrastructure and security. We’ve worked with security teams from some of the top banks to ensure your data is safe.

Now our infrastructure encrypts all network connections. Anytime your data touches a wire, it is encrypted. All data is encrypted at rest. Which means if anyone physically stole the hard drive from the data center, they would not be able to read it.

We spent a lot of time building secure infrastructure. And we will continue to work with our partners to stay ahead of the game.

Vaulting Ambition

When a developer says it will only take a month.

Run. 🏃

Fast.

And far.

As a developer I am guilty of under estimating. And oh boy did I underestimate. 😳

Our software goes from hardware, to the desktop, to the cloud. This pretty much covers every level. We have to contend with hardware drivers on many different platforms. We have to contend with deploying a desktop app for macOS and Windows. And we have cloud infrastructure to join it all together.

In hindsight this is pretty obvious how complicated a project like this is. But I can only say that now with hindsight.

And the beat goes on…

If you have any burning questions and want to roast the developer, contact [email protected] . Thanks for your patience everyone.