Practice makes perfect

Last year my wife and I started baking the country sourdough recipe from Chad Robertson’s Tartine Bread book every weekend. The process of making the dough roughly breaks down to first mixing it and then performing a series of regular actions to the dough over the next ~4 hours. We tried a few different methods of keeping track of this schedule like writing it out on a whiteboard each time but found we were often making mistakes with time math when doing so.

This led us to seeing if we could automate this scheduling aspect and it turned out that with Google scripts we could easily write something to create entries in Google Calendar programmatically.

Result of running the calendar script at 8:32am

If you would like to try it out yourself, you can visit this link to run it in your own google calendar when you’ve mixed your dough. It will populate a series of calendar entries for the steps as pictured above.

If you would like to see/fork the source code, it’s available on google scripts here.

There you could do things like tweak the schedule (maybe you have fewer folds, or different timing) or select a specific calendar you would like the entries to be created in. For instance we use that to create them in a shared calendar so both my wife and I can see what needs doing when.

If other people find the capability useful let me know, there are obviously a lot of places it could be improved.