All the techniques you learn from simple knife cuts to measuring to cooking techniques like braising and roasting, all those are object oriented development methods that can be applied to objects, objects of food. There's a lot of object oriented analogies between programming and cooking. If you can apply the "Julienne knife cut" method to a potato object, you can do it to an apple object and probably a carrot too.
Its a big linear programming puzzle to scale recipes. Did I mention scaling? Cooking is a whole barrel of square/cube law scalability puzzles to get cooking rates of different ingredients to intersect at one completion time.
There are some pretty interesting software engineering principles WRT recipe and meal design. Do you "waterfall" your holiday dinner design, or "agile" it?
There's the sheer queueing theory joy of arranging everything just so, such that its all just-in-time ready to be cooked, when it works its awesome and when you're stuck in the weeds its panic time, just like hacking something before a demo.
Its fun to iterate thru optimization getting the "design pattern" applied to the puzzle better and better. And there's so many design patterns, and if you stay out of pastry work, those design patterns are pretty flexible.
One point where you have me is most programmers hate testing, so I can see an issue with cooking.
I am kinda bummed that most "computer geeky" books about cooking fixate solely on gadgetry like liq N2 or molecular gastronomy, cool as that might be, there's a whole nother world of describing cooking with flowcharts and object oriented methods and development models and algorithms and "real computer geeky" stuff like that.
I have noticed that at least some people cook like they program, across a sample size of about 3. Here's to hoping that cooking something never becomes a technical interview fad stunt, although I suppose worse has happened in the past.
At least when I test the code it's not like half of it is gone afterwards like all the cake dough.. and everyone else crowding in to test it too. Cake dough requires rigorous testing, it does.
All the techniques you learn from simple knife cuts to measuring to cooking techniques like braising and roasting, all those are object oriented development methods that can be applied to objects, objects of food. There's a lot of object oriented analogies between programming and cooking. If you can apply the "Julienne knife cut" method to a potato object, you can do it to an apple object and probably a carrot too.
Its a big linear programming puzzle to scale recipes. Did I mention scaling? Cooking is a whole barrel of square/cube law scalability puzzles to get cooking rates of different ingredients to intersect at one completion time.
There are some pretty interesting software engineering principles WRT recipe and meal design. Do you "waterfall" your holiday dinner design, or "agile" it? There's the sheer queueing theory joy of arranging everything just so, such that its all just-in-time ready to be cooked, when it works its awesome and when you're stuck in the weeds its panic time, just like hacking something before a demo.
Its fun to iterate thru optimization getting the "design pattern" applied to the puzzle better and better. And there's so many design patterns, and if you stay out of pastry work, those design patterns are pretty flexible.
One point where you have me is most programmers hate testing, so I can see an issue with cooking.
I am kinda bummed that most "computer geeky" books about cooking fixate solely on gadgetry like liq N2 or molecular gastronomy, cool as that might be, there's a whole nother world of describing cooking with flowcharts and object oriented methods and development models and algorithms and "real computer geeky" stuff like that.
I have noticed that at least some people cook like they program, across a sample size of about 3. Here's to hoping that cooking something never becomes a technical interview fad stunt, although I suppose worse has happened in the past.