At the start of the year I re-started my home espresso obsession having grown dissatisfied with the declining quality of Nespresso pods. This isn’t my first foray into home espresso and I’ve owned a range of machines over the years. I bought my self the entry level but pretty dependable Breville BES840XL and a one shot burr grinder – the Viesimple Gen 4.
I have a couple of go-to beans from my local roaster (Counter Culture) but also like to try new roasts and usually pick up a bag or two when I travel. Every new bean takes a couple of shots to dial-in (grind, dose, pull duration, etc.) and I was keeping a log on Notes app, and scribbling the grind size on the label of the bean jar. A workable system but not ideal and not scalable.
About the same time, I was starting to play with LLM-based coding agents – Claude, GitHub Co-pilot, Codex, etc. and though it would be good to try a couple of real life software projects from ideation all the way through to delivery to get a sense of how the technology has evolved over the last couple of years. I learn best by doing.
So, over a rainy memorial day weekend I wrote a specification for a basic app to track my caffeine experimentation, used Claude Design to come up with mobile UX (iPhone and iPad) then brainstormed Claude Code on the best starter implementation and within a few hours and a few iterations – I had something working.
After a few more weekend design and development sprints – I added a QR code scanner and URL scraper for adding new beans to my collection, created a flow for pulling shots and rating them and few other tweaks. Beta testing consists of pulling a morning shot using the app for a week then making changes the next weekend. I wish all beta testing tasted this good.
I’m now at the point where I think the app is actually useful and would like to share it with a few more people to get some feedback. If you are interested – leave a comment or drop me an email at sharps [AT] softwhere [DOT] org. It’s not a self contained iOS app (yet) and you need to be able to run the app on a desktop or laptop on your home network using npx (Node Package Execute) – if none of that means anything to you – you’ll need to wait a little longer for the native iOS app.
Some near term goals for the app :
- Integrate it with the Half Descent Scale so the app can control the scale and also pull the timer and yield info straight into the app – I’m currently doing that manually
- Re-order beans directly from the app.
- Wrap or re-write the app so I can push it to the app store
- Move the storage to the cloud so you can easily synch between devices
Why the cryptic name ? 9 bars of pressure is the gold standard for brewing authentic espresso.
Rich Sharples' Weblog 