Every developer's personal site eventually grows a second personality. Some start posting Leica street photography. Some fall down the split-ergonomic keyboard hole. Mine started baking bread.
There is a recipes section on this website now — rye sourdough, traditional cozonac, chocolate babka, and crêpes. Everything is written in both Romanian and English, because publishing a cozonac recipe that only exists in English feels like a misdemeanor against somebody's grandmother.
I could pretend this is off-topic for a software blog. It isn't.
Dough is a production system with no rollback
Bread dough is the most honest runtime I've ever worked with. There is no hot reload. There is no git revert. You change two variables at 10 a.m. — three percent more water, a slightly warmer kitchen — and you find out whether your build passed six hours later, squatting in front of a little glass oven door like you're tailing logs on a server you can't ssh into.
When a loaf fails, you don't get a stack trace. You get a dense, slightly tragic brick and the vague suspicion that it was the yeast.
It's always the yeast. (It's never the yeast. You rushed the bulk fermentation.)
Obviously I built a calculator
Because I am incapable of having a normal hobby without writing TypeScript about it, there is also a baker's percentage calculator.
Pick a preset — sourdough, rye, babka, home-oven pizza at 300°C, or Neapolitan — scale it by flour weight or by how many loaves fit on your baking steel, and every gram updates in place. Every edit serializes straight into ?f= in the URL, so a bookmark is the whole formula. No account, no cloud sync, no "jump to recipe" button buried under 1,400 words about autumn in Vermont.
I could have used a spreadsheet. I did not want to use a spreadsheet.
October 16 update: keeping a starter has proved less straightforward than building the calculator. There's now a 100% rye recipe with a single-use sourdough build and a little commercial yeast, and a post about the maintenance contract.
Will there be more recipes? Occasionally, when something comes out of the oven worth your flour. Same deal as the rest of this blog.
$ bread babka
estimated: 1 afternoon
actual: 1 day (plus dishes)
$ make clean
make: *** No rule to make target 'kitchen'. Stop.
$ █