It’s been quiet around the blog. Too quiet. Buckle up friends, I’ve been cooking. While you couch potatoes enjoy the cozy safety of your homes I’ve crossed an ocean to find some new content. I’m in Honduras now. Driving a car so small that it can pass under the huge pick-up trucks that share the road with us. Road is of course an euphemism. There are so many potholes. Some are so deep that the whole car could be parked inside, no exaggerations.
I get up and take a first look in my bathroom mirror. It’s not pretty. I didn’t sleep much lately. The little dreams I had were filled with giant soldering irons haunting me, with scary voices uttering gibberish measurements in the background. Yuck. I can’t go on like this. Something has to change. I need to get my stuff together.
Like every normal person when something doesn’t work the way they want I thought about giving up. Do I really need hardware scales? I could just stop my coffee by hand. Or get a 100 euro bluetooth scale. Call it a day and move on. Be happy.
And already losing. Life has been too good lately. So I decided to tackle a new project: Hardware scales. For the normie crowd: I want to integrate scales directly into the drip tray of my machine. This way it can sense when and how much coffee drips into the cup. It can use this information to transition from one shot phase to another or to stop the shot once the target output is reached.
After my mental breakdown caused by nasty physics I decided to take a step back and think. Very interesting, you should try it too once in a while! I’m chasing perfection. No compromises. Many before me have failed. But does it make sense to accept nothing less? To go all in, no matter what it takes?
Absolutely! I’ll let the others choke on their compromises while I’ll consume only the most elite, tasty coffee of them all. So while my whiny little paragraph from before might have suggested otherwise, I’m more dedicated than ever to find IT (the holy grail of coffee, not the monster in the sewer).
The world contains some pretty nasty stuff. Venomous spiders. The black plague. The neoliberal ideology. And then there is nastier stuff. Like every animal roaming the continent of Australia. Quantum mechanics. The colonial past of France. But the worst of them all is fluid dynamics.
It comes to no surprise that this word appears often on suicide notes of engineers. Because we’ll eventually understand how gravity relates to the other fundamental forces and other stupid little puzzles the universe keeps offering us. But how water behaves in a pressurized system? Forget it! You can either accept it or go mad. You’ll neither be the first nor the last one, that’s for sure.