From Backend Engineer to Sourdough Baker: Finding Peace in Precision

There’s something deeply familiar about the way a sourdough starter behaves. Like a temperamental microservice, it requires constant monitoring, precise conditions, and regular feeding. Three years ago, when I first started baking bread, I didn’t expect to find so many parallels between my day job as a distributed systems engineer and my weekend baking adventures.

My first sourdough starter, bubbling away

I remember debugging my first distributed tracing system at Cloudscape. Hours of poring over logs, tweaking configurations, and monitoring metrics. The system was alive in its own way, each service communicating with others, creating a complex dance of requests and responses. Now, as I watch my starter double in size, bubbling with life, I see the same patterns of growth and reaction.

The Engineering Mindset

Engineers love metrics. We measure everything: latency, throughput, error rates. When I started baking, I brought the same approach to my kitchen. My apartment now has:

  • A digital scale accurate to 0.1g
  • A temperature and humidity sensor
  • A pH meter (yes, really)
  • An infrared thermometer

My over-engineered baking setup

My partner jokes that our kitchen looks more like a laboratory than a place to cook. She’s not wrong. But there’s comfort in precision, in understanding the variables that lead to success or failure.

Learning from Failure

Last month, I spent three weeks trying to optimize our service mesh for better performance. We reduced latency by 40%, but the journey was filled with failed experiments and unexpected behaviors. Similarly, my path to the perfect loaf has been paved with dense, flat, or outright inedible breads.

A particularly memorable bread failure

But each failure taught me something. Just as a production incident leads to better monitoring and more robust systems, each failed loaf helped me understand hydration rates, gluten development, and fermentation times better.

The Joy of Creation

There’s a unique satisfaction in building systems that handle millions of requests per day. But there’s also joy in creating something tangible, something you can share with friends over dinner. When I pull a perfectly crusted loaf from the oven, the sense of achievement rivals any successful production deployment.

My best loaf yet

Finding Balance

The tech industry moves at a relentless pace. New frameworks, languages, and best practices emerge constantly. Baking sourdough forces me to slow down. You can’t rush fermentation. You can’t deploy a hotfix to underproofed dough. Nature operates on its own schedule.

Perhaps that’s the most valuable lesson. In a world of continuous deployment and instant scaling, there’s wisdom in processes that cannot be rushed. My starter, which I’ve named main (yes, I’m that kind of nerd), reminds me daily that some things require patience.

What’s Next

I’m currently experimenting with a Raspberry Pi-powered fermentation chamber that monitors temperature and humidity, logging the data to Prometheus. Because apparently, I can’t completely leave the engineer behind, even when I’m baking.

My IoT fermentation chamber prototype

Is it excessive? Absolutely. But it brings together my love for technology and baking in a way that makes me happy. And isn’t that what hobbies are for?

Follow my baking adventures on Instagram @SarahBakesBread or check out the fermentation chamber project on GitHub.