For this week’s video, in honor of it being Never Graduate Week, I went hunting for a !!con video involving Go (because !!con is … basically a Recurse Center alumni event anyhow). And behold! Daisy Tsang’s lovely talk about sourdough and observability qualifies 🙂 Videos in this series are added to a YouTube list over here.
Tsang starts by talking about bread (mm, bread), and being inspired by a Go meetup talking about Prometheus that she could attempt to monitor her sourdough progress!
Since Prometheus is designed to be non-clustered (according to the talk) and be efficient on single-node systems, it makes sense to use this for the project, using Raspberry Pis and some sensors.
In order to expose the data to Prometheus, Tsang wrote an exporter in Go, which you can see on GitHub. And then do the things you might expect: configure the server, listen for connections, make a dashboard (always make a dashboard).
Tsang mentioned a few readings that would be interesting to check out: a blog post she wrote for Gopher Academy, and a similar project by Justin Lam, leveraging computer vision using Python for monitoring sourdough, and, if you want to just go make bread, a beginner’s guide for that.
It’s possible I may have overengineered a solution to this project.
Daisy Tsang, Observability in the Kitchen: Improve Your Breadmaking Skills w/OSS!!, !!con West 2019
Great talk, and an easy 10 minutes with some interesting code to follow along (but also, now I want bread).