I run maintenance at a palm oil mill in Malaysia and build the software I wished we had. This is where I write about both — what the plant taught me, and what it cost me to learn it.
I'm a mill engineer. My day job is keeping a palm oil mill running — about a hundred machines, a crew of twenty, and the constant question of what is going to stop next.
I am not a software engineer by training. I started building because I got tired of asking what broke last time and finding the answer in a paper logbook, a WhatsApp thread, or somebody's memory.
That turns out to be an advantage rather than a handicap. I know why an electrical fault has to reach a certified chargeman, why two fitters go out together on a hot job, and why a technician will not use anything that takes more than a minute. Those aren't features you add later — they're the shape of the thing.
Two things I've built and use, and notes on building them. Everything on this site is in daily use by people who never asked for an app — the only test I trust.
Maintenance and per-machine repair history for palm oil mills. Every machine keeps its own chart — what has gone wrong with this one, how often, and who fixed it.
Three sounding dips into net palm kernel tonnage, on a phone, offline. Replaces a printed chart and a calculator on top of a bunker.
Why I stopped building a work log and started building a medical record for machines — and what the mill taught me that the software didn't.
A year on Ghost, a subscription I couldn't justify, and what I found when I finally went to move. Not a bad tool — the wrong one.
If you run a mill or a plant and any of this sounds like your problem, I'd genuinely like to hear about it — akmalka97@gmail.com