I love coffee. How else could I get anything done?

🧑‍🔬 Differently from what’s usual, this is a light post appreciating coffee and the small pleasures of building things for oneself. I will probably come back now and then to add new bits as I experience them.

If you want to read the heavy stuff, checkout my other posts about LLMs and evolution.

# ☕ Life

By no means I am an expert, but I enjoy experimenting with it and discovering peculiar tastes, qualities, roasts and serving styles. The hands-on process of making a good brew (grinding, pouring, and the bubbling of water as it gets ready) is both familiar and relaxing. Coffee has been a constant companion throughout my adult life and I have great memories associated to it. From all the coffees shared with friends to chat about the latest life news, to those I remember because of how unique or unusual they were – last year for instance, drinking an unexpected specialty coffee from the back of a jeep in the Rub’ al Khali desert.

As I write this I am currently drinking a Sumo espresso roast from Rwanda, brewed in a Moka pot, called Women’s Crown – hey, it’s another way to travel! 🌍

# Learning about it

Recently, I have read How to Make the Best Coffee at Home and discovered its author, James Hoffmann. The book is a good manual to quickly get around coffee and its different qualities and brew styles. It’s an easy read that does not mandate, does not sound snob, and shows the author’s enjoyment for coffee.

While reading, I also discovered that my V60 technique was quite lacking and have since improved it by using a finer grind size and a shorter timing for the brew, as described in the book and in this video.

# Time for it

Fueled by coffee (what else?), I thought of scratching my own itch and build another product targeting a single customer, myself.

The result is below1 and standalone here: a super simple V60 coffee timer that strives to be minimalist, useful, and aesthetically pleasing. I am not sure if I managed to get any of these goals, but sure I had fun building it. And sometimes that’s all it matters.

    00:00

    From A Better 1 Cup V60 Technique, by James Hoffmann

    # Footnotes

    1. 👆 I am as surprised as you that the above embedding works, thanks to Jekyll’s include and modern HTML parsers being quite resilient (e.g., to the double head section I introduce). ↩