April 2026 – samfirke.com

Words Good Enough to Eat

A couple of winters back I read Unauthorized Bread, a novella by Cory Doctorow. In that story, a set of cardamom buns makes an appearance, twice.

The description of the buns was too tantalizing. And I was on winter break with time on my hands. So I made a batch of vegan cardamom buns (from this recipe: https://myveganminimalist.com/vegan-orange-cardamom-buns/).

They were quite good! They were also a lot of work and I’m not often game for involved cooking projects so I haven’t made them again.

The most recent book I finished, Automatic Noodle, also found me reading mouthwatering descriptions of a food I’d never tried. The two books have a lot in common: near-future sci-fi set on Earth, anarchist vibes – even the titles are similar. (Side note: I liked Automatic Noodle but didn’t love it. I am realizing that “cozy” books, with their low-stakes plots and pleasant vibes, aren’t my thing.)

In this story, four sentient robots team up and open a noodle shop that serves biang biang, a certain style of Chinese hand-pulled noodle served with chili oil. I read the book in bed and kept thinking night after night, “I need to make these noodles.”

My kids and I finally did it! We were all pulling noodles and slapping them on the counter, wha-bam, and having a jolly good time. Some were thick, some were thin, some were very long. I stretched and slapped the noodles to my full extended wingspan and still they did not break.

I’m not sure we cooked them exactly right. We used this recipe but loaded into my recipe manager which doesn’t show all the pictures… looking at it now, and reading about how some biang biang is as thick as a belt, ours were too thin.

I would love to try an authentic version. That said, we were all thrilled with how they turned out and wished we’d made more.

Going farther back: the book Little House in the Big Woods enticed me to make maple syrup candy by pouring syrup on fresh snow.

It’s a testament to the authors’ evocative descriptions that each of these stories compelled me to cook.

What food from fiction have you brought to life?

Running Our Own Fork of Apache Superset in Production

Here’s an update on my journey deploying Apache Superset and using Docker. It felt good to write about what I’ve learned at work, and it’s been a while: I don’t think I posted here that my job title is now Senior Data Engineer! But people who don’t work on computer infrastructure might not find this one interesting.

In 2023, we deployed Apache Superset at the City of Ann Arbor as our Business Intelligence (BI) / data visualization platform, choosing it over Microsoft Power BI or Metabase. That decision has been a resounding success. Superset is a rock-solid product that keeps getting better … and* we’ve saved over $150k and counting in license costs vs. proprietary software.

I’ve re-read the 2015 talk “Choose Boring Technology” a couple of times while working in my current job (that link goes to a slideshow version of the talk, turned into a website – that’s the format I’ve experienced it in). The author talks about having only three innovation tokens to spend on new tech at a given time. The rest has to be boring. Then when you’ve mastered the new tech, you get a token back to spend on something else.

Deploying Superset took all my tokens: Docker, DevOps, Linux sysadmin. I said, we will only deploy official Docker images released by the Superset project. No way are we in the business of creating our own, this is complicated enough.

I learned a ton in the intervening years. I’m still learning a ton. It’s great! As I’ve gotten those tokens back by becoming competent at those technologies, I’ve been able to do more with our Superset deployment.

First that looked like building our own Superset Docker image, tweaking the environment but not touching the code. The project forced our hand on this because starting in 4.1.0, it no longer included basic drivers needed to use Superset out of the box, most notably the one to connect to the PostgreSQL backend database. I’m still not entirely convinced this was the right choice for the project but I saw the other side’s argument that everyone really ought to be building their own image.