Among engineers, there are probably many people who haven’t really left home in a few months. Particularly in US IT work, there have been moves to reduce the amount of required in-person attendance, shrink offices, and focus on remote work.
As such, our concern is how to optimize the home environment for work, with the many issues that creates. Desks, chairs and PCs are all worth considering, but for now, let’s talk about drinks.
It’s well-known that one of the keys to raising and maintaining your performance as an engineer is coffee.
Coffee has a great many effects on the body, beyond the relaxing effect of the smell, or waking you up through caffeine. Chlorogenic acid, a type of polyphenol, is plentiful in coffee; it acts as a stimulant on the brain, and has anti-aging effects as well. Furthermore, by working on sympathetic nerves, it burns fat and acts to suppress hunger.
In short, for an engineer who often spends time sitting down and using their head, it’s perfect.
This is strictly my own experience, but I feel like good engineers tend to have good coffee, taking great care to pick the right beans, pour it properly, and so on. This might be because of the excitement that comes from cooking, and the creativity it nurtures. Energy drinks are fine sometimes, but if you’re going to drink something anyway, I recommend starting from quality coffee.
Now then, let’s start with some good coffee that will help you to become healthier, and do better work as an engineer.
Japan is beginning to have more subscription-type services for coffee, where you order from home and they deliver the perfect coffee straight to you. I’ll be introducing a few such services.
1. PostCoffee
Firstly, PostCoffee. Starting at 1,480 yen per month, it lets you encounter new types of coffee every month while staying at home, delivering carefully chosen speciality coffee every month.
PostCoffee uses AI to select coffees, and will deliver recommendations across 150,000 patterns to you just by answering a few simple questions at the start.
This concierge function is its biggest draw, and leaves you to wonder what kind of coffee you will get each month. If you like coffee but don’t know much about the differences according to where it’s made or the types of beans, and still want to drink quality coffee — as well as how to drink it — then I recommend this subscription service.
2. WHITE COFFEE
Once you drink it, you can tell the app what you thought of it and it will send you coffee closer to your preferences. This lets you refine the coffee you get closer and closer to what you like.
3. COTTEA
COTTEA performs the usual diagnosics, and then sends you a free sample of three mugs worth of coffee. This lets you test a coffee subscription without any serious investment.
After drinking it, you can tell COTTEA what you thought of it, and it will recommend coffees that might suit you. If you like what you’ve had so far, you can continue with the service, and if not, you can cut it off then and there. This makes it perfect for anyone who wants to try first without spending any money.
4. NesCafe Ambassador
While not a coffee subscription system,
is also a good choice for busy engineers. This service delivers a coffee cartridge and barista machine, which lets you drink coffee as if it were freshly made by a barista. If you want a better sort of NesCafe, this might be a good choice.Conclusion
What do you think? Good coffee is easy to come by on the internet, complete with recommendations of beans and drinking methods tailored just for you. Sometimes you can go out on the town and drink at a cafe, but 2020 is a good opportunity to reassess your home working environment, and raise your efficiency and creativity with better coffee at home.
Subscription services are commonly used in coffee services, and a great many of them use mass data and AI selection to determine tastes and make suggestions. Engineers are the key not only for the customer-interfacing parts of the app and website, but in making an effective use of data for the service.
Here’s to coffee, and healthy, efficient, skilled engineering.
