I’ve been looking for something to do with all of my time at 331 Cortland. It’s been a bit over a month here, and although things are at times busy with helping customers, or selling bread, I also have tons of downtime. It’s been difficult trying to figure out what to do with my time; I’ve done some reading, some sitting, stretching, bread stamp making, email responding, but often I run of things to do.
I used to do a lot of programming, and many of my previous jobs revolved around it. I liked working on the programs, but never wanted to pursue it because the things I was programming for were not of interest to me. Now I run a business that is in large need of systems, and it is time to put some together. I’ve been avoiding the computer for a long time now; my time at CNET definitely discouraged me from even wanting to be close to one.
My last attempt at programming was to create a starter feeding program, back in August of last year. The idea was that each owner of a starter could enter in their feedings, and we could learn about activity levels of different peoples starters by sharing all of this information. I still have plans to at some point complete something like this, but there are more immediate needs right now for Sour Flour.
Right now we are in the middle of our Goal of selling 1000 loaves of bread, and are a bit behind. With less than a month to go, we still have 443 loaves to bake. Although we have sold many loaves through 331 Cortland, and have just started selling a few more loaves at La Victoria, not enough people know about Sour Flour yet.
If you live in San Francisco, we want to be your bakery, so part of what that means is that we need to create closer relationships with our customers. But considering we are aiming to have at least a few hundred customers, we need a good system to keep track of, and stay in touch with everyone. Although systems have existed before computers, databases can work really well for some of the programs we need.
The program I will be working on will start off a way to track customers, and the bread they buy and receive. Each bread will eventually get linked back to the batch it came from, which will include information about the formula, as well as how the starter and dough was kept up until the bread was baked. But for the time being, we are just trying to put together a simple way to see who is ordering what bread, and to make sure we can get it to everyone who wants it.
If you know PHP and MySQL, you are welcome to help out. Contact me at (415) 509 – 3380, or email at danny@sourflour.org. I’ll have updates as more pieces of the program become usable.