Most of the effort comes at the beginning during development of the process, formulations, facility. I always produced lower quantities, about 40kg per month or over 500 chocolate bars.
I would work nights, weekends and ocasional afternoons. It was a lot of fun. When making chocolate, you end up smelling like chocolate. Your skin and clothing get a chocolate scent that even stranger can recognize. My wife was super cooperative. I trained a few chocolate makers.
I also saw making chocolate as nice change from working around computers all my life. Yet, after machines break down, chocolate gets splattered all over walls and floors, chocolate loses temper, or a batch of bad cocoa arrives, I ended up appreciating all the beauties of software development and managing virtual servers.
Do checkout Potomac Chocolate, he is a solid chocolate maker in Virginia who is also a sysadmin by profession.
Agreed! Tempering is a very tricky and rewarding skill as cacao butter can crystalize in multiple forms, each with its own properties (eg. shine, color, snap, stability). It is Polymprphic in nature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_butter).
This means the chocolate maker has to use temperature, agitation and time as the three variables to generate the right crystals and get rid of the others.
Then there is the cooling process, where, as the chocolate cools it generates its own heat, which will heat the upper parts of the chocolate, potentially moving them into their temperature danger zone and getting them out of temper. That's why you see fans and careful temp control when tempering.
This is a topic I studied and really love. After hacking my way into chocolate making, the results were extraordinary. I became a famous chocolate maker in Colombia, was portrayed in magazines and became somehow known in the local gourmet scene. I learned a lot and had a chance to meet wonderful people, all while running an IT-sector company doing CMS and cloud infrastructure development.
For the Hacker News crowd, I think the article does well-intentioned but misleading assumptions while not being very encouraging for people to get out and make chocolate. For example, conching is not necessarily required, as is soy lecithin. Domori, a top chocolate maker in Italy does only 'partial conching' and most artisan chocolate makers have a single process for refining and conching on one machine.
If you really want to learn about chocolate making, and doing it on your own, I would definitely recommend these resources:
1. Chocolate Alchemy (http://www.chocolatealchemy.com/), ran by Jon Nancy. He revolutionized the artisan, small scale chocolate industry by popularizing the use of indian lentil grinders (Santha, Ultra) for grinding cocoa. He sells the cocoa and the machines, and his ingenious solutions for refining, winnowing (removing shell) and tempering are a great reference. When starting out, I actually bought one of these machines in India after visiting a friend. Hacked a computer fan for cooling and opened ventilation holes to avoid overheating. Worked great. Don't even get me started on winnowing (husk removal): my household versions ranged from a hair dryer and tumbling beans to a later version with a juice maker connected to a shop vac through complex tubing to control airflow and separate the husk from the bean efficiently.
2. The Chocolate Life (https://www.thechocolatelife.com/), ran by Clay Gordon is a social network for chocolate makers. The archives are full of input from chocolate makers who later became famous.
3. Eat good chocolate. Stores like Chocosphere sell some of the best chocolate online. Fine gourmet stores carry great chocolate. Several brands to try, just look at International Chocolate Award winners for references.
Thanks for sharing Presentious. It sounds trivial, but producing lightweight presentations synced with audio is quite hard. I like how you can go ahead on audio or slides and then sync them back together.
As a long time user of Harvest, I have to say it is refreshing to see open source alternatives being developed.
Harvest is expensive for moderate-sized teams but their support is very fast to respond and the user experience is quite nice. Yet, after noticing a glaring flaw in Harvest considering non-billable hours as 'Budget', I'm stuck and have to live through never ending over-budget false alerts. Without an ETA, this is the time where I'd be happy to roll my sleeves up, get it fixed and submit a pull request...
This is really interesting, specially if it really reduces the burden of running Mysql with failover or multiple slave databases. This is similar to what is currently available on AWS - RDS, but requires separate database instances and is very tricky to implement on development environments or local infrastructure.
I'd be interested in knowing if any of you have tried it or inspected the code in detail.
I agree with your points. It is indeed a viable, if somewhat clunky solution.
For getting the data into S3, we found exponential improvements in using the AWS CLI, as I believe it handles uploads in a multi-threaded way.
S3fs turned out to be viable for our use case, storing Magento Enterprise content assets which are then served directly from S3, so the app's upload features rely on s3fs as well as the file checks from the app itself (which are indeed quite slow).
I've always wanted to do it natively, mounting EBS volumes on more than one instance (which is not currently possible) or wishing for a native NFS service like AWS released.
All in all, it is a happy day for me. More options make us more powerful.
S3fs filesystems are really slow. We tested around 10mb/s for file upload. Where it really struggles is when you have a lot of files in a folder. Try doing an 'ls' on a folder with hundreds of files to see it break.
I'd recommend a Noodler's Ahab ($23.66 on Amazon). What makes it fun is that the nib is flexible, allowing broader or thinner strokes depending on pressure. Plus, its a pen built to be hacked. After a while you can cut the feeding unit to your liking, making ink flow more or less.
I got into re-learning to write a bit over a year ago. I was a clumsy left hander with great keyboard skills but terrible handwriting. Take a look at IAMPETH, they have tons of material on vintage writing styles. I even followed Spencerian methods from the the nineteenth century.
I would work nights, weekends and ocasional afternoons. It was a lot of fun. When making chocolate, you end up smelling like chocolate. Your skin and clothing get a chocolate scent that even stranger can recognize. My wife was super cooperative. I trained a few chocolate makers.
I also saw making chocolate as nice change from working around computers all my life. Yet, after machines break down, chocolate gets splattered all over walls and floors, chocolate loses temper, or a batch of bad cocoa arrives, I ended up appreciating all the beauties of software development and managing virtual servers.
Do checkout Potomac Chocolate, he is a solid chocolate maker in Virginia who is also a sysadmin by profession.