I was in the office the other week, and was enjoying the biweekly lunch my employer provides. I currently work in the intersection of software, insurance, and lending. Now you’d think it’d be pretty far away from hype, but apparently generative AI and large language models are a hot topic to talk about while eating free pizza.

Apparently growing a bigger ox with more compute is a pretty popular idea.

So instead we’re going to talk about an arguably even more important piece of technology in the office. The coffee machine. We have two options, a K%$ig and a Breville Barista (not an ad). The bitter potion that fuels the organic neural network to generate code, Ex%#l spreadsheets, P*&#rP!@^t slides, J*#a tickets, Con%^*!@ce pages, and who knows what else. But before I get to the one at the office, we’re going to go back to the beginning.

My relationship with coffee started my sophomore year of college. Before then, any caffeine I had came from soda/pop and occasionally chai. Weirdly enough I’d had my first drink earlier that year. Not a typical order to do things. So why did I start drinking coffee? Well I had a 7am shift doing IT support for Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, ironically the majority of the students working at the shop to maintain the college’s labs and hardware weren’t studying engineering. Half the week, it was immediately followed by Sanskrit and then two econ electives. The other half it was followed by human physiology, and then organic chemistry I immediately after it. And to top it all off, I was terrible at keeping a bedtime.

So much like Thanos, coffee was inevitable.

I just had one problem, I hated the taste of coffee. I didn’t mind the ice cream flavor, but the actual drink was yuck. Luckily I soon learned that lattes and macchiatos existed. So a routine was set. Get a coffee after work from the top basement in Benedum. Get to either Sanskrit or human phys. And then refill at the nearest coffee stall on the way to the next class. Though I quickly learned it was cheaper to just order coffee add a lot of cream and sugar.

The next semester wasn’t much better, first class almost every day was at 8:30am. Way too much cream and sugar became my go to coffee up until that summer.

Fast forward to that summer. I was catching up with a friend of mine from middle school. We hadn’t seen each other in a year, so we met up at St@!#%^ks. He told me how he was finishing up the accelerated part of his accelerated medical program early. Meanwhile I was trying to switch majors for hopefully the last time into computer science. I’d also mentioned to him that I was trying to figure out why I couldn’t lose weight, I went to the gym regularly and walked a couple miles every day. He looked at me and said “you realize how much sugar you’re consuming right? You put 4 packs in your coffee”.

Now I’m the kind of stupid who needs to learn something a dozen times before it clicks. But every once in a while I get lucky and someone I’ve known since we could first call ourselves teenagers tells me something that I listen to. (Btw if anyone in Allentown, PA is looking for direct primary care, I highly recommend Keystone Direct Health, note this is not a paid advertisement).

Now I loved sweets, I wasn’t going to give up ice cream and baked goods, so I was going to have to learn how to drink black coffee.

It didn’t start well at first. I began with instant coffee. I experimented with the stove, the microwave. Boiling water first, boiling it with the mix. Regardless of the permutation, I was not a fan.

Luckily my mother loved to buy appliances she’d never use because they were on sale. So I liberated a cheap drip coffee machine on my way back to Pittsburgh for the next semester.

Eventually I grew to like it. I quickly learned that the cheapest bag of ground coffee beans at Giant Eagle was not the way to go, but the 2nd cheapest was fine. For now, this was good enough. The following summer I had two internships, both of which also had an all important coffee machine. The first one was at a startup where I was quite literally the intern working out of the storage room. They had a K#%ig, and I quickly tried all the flavors. And the second was in the corporate office for the local grocery and gas station chain in Pittsburgh. There we had three big machines, one for dark roast, one for decaf, and one for hot chocolate. With all the bags of grounds in the drawer underneath. There were only two interns in our batch who worked as developers. And both of us finished work faster than we would get it, so we became intimately familiar with the break room and coffee machine.

By now I’m a senior, living in Sennott Square, sleeping a few blocks away, grinding through speedrunning a CS major. All while making D$#@in D*&#uts and P#*%ra rich. I was drinking somewhere between 6 and 8 cups of coffee a day. Start the day filling up my bottle with coffee from the french press, then continue to refill it throughout the day. Not the healthiest, but that plus the windowless networking lab turned senior lounge are how I finished that degree.

The number of cups per day stayed high for a while. The following summer I started working at the big bank, I was finishing my work faster than it was coming in, so I found myself taking a lot of coffee breaks. I did migrate though from the free coffee M%$rs coffee machine in the break area to americanos from coffee shops and stalls near the office, something about the taste of espresso.

The following year, I was promoted and switched teams. This time the only local teammate I had lived about a block away from me. So it was easier to send a ping, and walk over to do some pairing if either of us ever got stuck. It was also healthier for my wallet, I missed the taste of espresso, but I didn’t want to keep paying the premium for shop coffee in Shadyside, so I did some research, and bought an Aeropress (not sponsored) plus a manual burr grinder. 10/10 do not recommend buying a manual unless you enjoy punishing yourself for a cup of coffee.

Sometime while I was on this team, I did an intense sadhana for a month where I was both fasting with a highly restricted diet, and abstaining from my various vices, one of which having the socially acceptable addiction of caffeine. Since then my coffee intake went from too many cups a day to 0-3 depending. Also did a number to my alcohol intake, but that’s a different story.

Using the Aeropress became a daily habit until I switched jobs. The commute out to RIDC West sucked, but they gave me ample snacks, lunch, and they had an espresso machine. So I swapped making my own coffee to pressing a button on the machine. Personally I liked the taste of my homemade more, but ya can’t beat free (something something paying for it with labor). Later I switched offices to the coworking space we were renting in North Shore. This time there was a communal coffee pot, if I recall correctly, the building got their beans from Commonplace Coffee. I preferred espresso, but hey, free is still free. Plus, folks were pretty good about making a new pot if they emptied the last.

Then much like the shock of the fire nation attacking, we had a “once in a lifetime” pandemic. So I was back to making my own coffee at home. During the plague, I moved from Pittsburgh to Austin. The building I was living in had free coffee with an espresso function in one of the resident lounges, but the machine was constantly broken, so it’d be a daily tossup on if I made my own coffee or pressed a button.

Towards the end of the pandemic, I switched jobs and was doing contracting for the DoD via a big tech firm. Now you’d think big tech firm means some good quality snacks and coffee. But Uncle Sam’s a bit too cheap for that, instead we had a big tub of Fo#%rs that could make somewhere between 200 and 300 cups. Each cup then cost a dollar, honestly pretty clever, spend $18 on a tub, and make back between 180% to 280% on that initial spend. For me though, it got old pretty quickly after being in the office every day, so I let my wallet take the L, and I started getting americanos from the nearby shops.

And now we finally make full circle back to the current office I work in. It’s a smedium sized company, so I like going in to put people to faces I see in T&^ms meetings. I still love my aeropress, but it’s three parts plus a rubber piece to clean. So I bought a non-manual burr grinder from someone down the street, and switched to pour over with between 22-24g of beans. I prefer the taste of my press, but I’m happy with the pour over.

The days I’m in the office though, it’s always espresso plus hot water. I have a routine where after I get in and get set up at my desk, I walk over to the break area. First I clean out the machine and counters. Ironically my aeropress was too much effort to clean, but wiping down the granite and washing the removable parts of the machine are fine. It’s a great little ritual, I get to know that every time I make a cup of my bitter potion that day, the machine is relatively clean and there isn’t an old coffee smell in the air. Plus it’s a good excuse to make small talk and catch up with the other folks who like to get in early while they put a pod in the K%$ig.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a comment about how the machine is too complicated to make a single cup. Which to be fair, compared to putting in a little plastic cup and waiting, the process of grinding, tamping, and pressing a button involves more steps. But I would push back on that qualitatively. I would argue that I use this bitter potion near daily to fuel my brain. For something I do that frequently, I like to get it tuned to what works for me. I don’t mind the taste of “easy coffee”, but I prefer the taste of something more fresh. Sometimes it’s nice to have a deeper relationship with the tools you use daily. But what do I know, I’m just some person on the internet.