People ask me, kindly and with real curiosity, why bread and code are on the same website. It's a fair question. The two things don't look related from the outside. One is flour and water on a wooden counter. The other is a laptop and a long afternoon of reading error messages.
But I've spent enough time with both to know they're the same work wearing different clothes.
The short version
I'm Gina. I live in Altoona, Iowa. I've been baking sourdough for a few months, and I've been building software for a living for years. I want to be plain about that order because most bread websites hide how new the person is. I don't want to.
What I have is a lot of loaves, a lot of failures, and enough dev instinct to write down what I learn as I go.
In June of 2026 I filed an LLC — Gina Makes LLC, in Iowa, one member, which is me. Before that it was a sole proprietorship, which is a formal way of saying it was just me and a spreadsheet. The LLC didn't change what I do. It changed how seriously I let myself take it. There's something clarifying about putting a name on a piece of paper and having the state hand it back to you.
This site is where both crafts live now. Not a bread blog with a dev page bolted on. One brand, two streams, same person.
Bread taught me patience. Code taught me the same thing backwards.
Sourdough is a slow argument you have with time. You cannot make a loaf go faster by wanting it more. The dough will tell you when it's ready and your job is mostly to notice. Underproof it and you get a brick with a tight crumb. Overproof it and it slumps in the oven and you get a sad frisbee. The only way to get good at it is to pay attention to the same four ingredients over and over until you know what they feel like. A few months in, I'm still learning to feel that.
Code taught me the identical lesson from the other direction. Software that ships fast and gets rushed at the end always comes back. The bug you skipped testing is the bug that wakes somebody up at 2 a.m. The part you didn't document is the part that becomes unmaintainable in eight months. Every shortcut is a loan with interest.
Both crafts are slow processes that reward attention to your materials. Flour is a material. So is a database schema. Neither one forgives you for guessing.
That's the whole thesis of this site, honestly. If you want it in one sentence, that's the sentence.
About the starter, and the <dev>
My starter is fed once a day, every day, with King Arthur Organic Unbleached Whole Wheat Flour. Same flour, same time, forever. That's not a brand loyalty thing so much as a control thing — if the flour never changes, then when the starter behaves differently I know it's the temperature or the schedule and not the ingredient. It also means a little whole wheat rides into every dough I make, which I disclose on the recipe pages because it affects the flavor.
The <dev> in the wordmark isn't decoration. I'm a freelance developer. I take on AI and software work for small teams and nonprofits, mostly practical tools that have to survive being handed off to someone who didn't build them. I build on my own framework, called The Starter, and license it cleanly to the people who use it. The angle brackets are literal. It felt dishonest to hide that half of what I do behind a tab.
What's a reference recipe and what isn't
Let me be plain about this because it matters.
The recipes on this site are reference recipes. They're doughs I've collected, worked out on paper, and set down carefully in one place — the kind of pages you can pull up with floury hands and follow through a bake. What they aren't is a claim of personal mastery. I've been baking a few months. The two I've truly baked myself, with my own starter and my own oven, are the Classic and the Italian. The rest of the library I'll get through as time and appetite allow.
The kit page is different — every tool on it is in my kitchen. If I haven't used it, I don't review it.
What Field Notes is for
The recipe pages and the kit reviews are the reference layer of the site. Field Notes is the other half — the in-progress writing. How something got built. What I got wrong and then fixed. Why a recipe changed. The reasoning behind a decision that ended up as a one-line note on a recipe page.
Recipe pages are the map. Field Notes is the walk.
It's less polished on purpose. If you want to know how the sausage, or in this case the sourdough, actually gets made, this is where I'll tell you.
What's next
Issue No. 02 is already up: the story of how the baker's percentage calculator on this site came together, including the math bug I caught late and what it cost me to fix. After that I want to write about the whole-wheat starter decision, the oven-proof workaround that saved my winter bakes, and probably something about what it's actually like to learn a craft and build a tool for it at the same time.
If you bake, come for the recipes. If you build, come for the process. If you do both, I think you'll recognize something here.
Either way — thanks for reading. Go feed your starter.