What David Chang, Food Teach Us About Programming
A little over ten years ago I read small article in a print copy of GQ about this chef called David Chang. It was the first time I had heard of him, but I was super inspired that there was an Asian person making waves in a space where traditionally Asians had not made an impact. Not only that, he was doing it making ramen. Mother fucking ramen!!!
Fast forward a decade and David Chang has built a food and media empire. You might have seen him on Mind of Chef or Netflix’s Ugly Delicious. Recently he’s joined The Ringer podcast network. This blog is a response to some ideas that have been simmering in my mind, but in the last many months have become a topic on The Dave Chang show.
In short, we become better at our craft by seeing and analyzing what goes in other crafts. We have so much to learn about software engineering by looking outside of software engineering. This is a response to Episode 36 and Episode 37 of the Dave Chang Show.
Engineering As An Artisan Craft
Like making amazing food, engineering is a craft and skill. We become better engineers by learning from those that came before us and practicing our craft. As Software Engineers, we are a bit more fortunate since the resources for our craft after almost limitless. Obviously we are limited by O(n), but we don’t have to source new keystrokes or electrons to write a new function. With that said, there are still a lot of lessons we can learn from the culinary world.
There Is SO MUCH To Know
We are constantly studying. Because of social media and how big celebrity chefs have become, the field of cooking and ‘molecular gastronomy’ is advancing so quickly. There are so many new techniques and sciences you now have you know and potentially build upon.
A generation ago the idea of fermenting was isolating to ethnic foods and ways to make things last longer. We now have Rene Redzepi of Noma fame scientifically documenting and sharing The Noma Guide To Fermentation to ferment everything including blueberries.
And while there is a book you can pay for and buy, most of the knowledge Rene has been pretty open about sharing. In essence, he open sourced his tech.
Be Dedicated And Obsessive
Exploring the concept of fermentation, if you listen to Episode 37 you’ll hear Rene going off about fermentation, you realize he’s geeking out on it. One of the most famous chefs of this generation is geeking out over the practice of fermentation, a process usually relegated to making sauerkraut or kimchee.
In order to be excellent, we need to have this level of obsessiveness. Don’t get me wrong, I think you can be a successful software engineer without having that level of obsessiveness. I’m talking about being an excellent one. We exist in a field where (if you so desire) you can make your mark, but you need to be a true subject matter expert in order to start pushing the field.
If you ever read (or listen) to Dan Abramov (now at overreacted.io) or any other famous developer, they are obsessing over some small/obscure part of a project and able to go at lengths on it. It’s this level of dedication to any craft that leads to excellent results.
Umami — Challenge The Status Quo (CTSQ)
Umami was recently (in the culinary sense) accepted as a fifth flavor. Since then, we see this explosion of people pushing for and aiming for that umami taste. Umami is now the bleeding edge. You see it thrown around regularly in food vernacular now. Before all this David Change gave a talk about Umami and its other known alias MSG.
It’s not hard to imagine another universe where a famous chef going on record for such statements ends up falling to obscurity, and honestly life would probably have gone on. But someone took a risk, challenged the status quo, and now we are in a whole new era of flavor and food.
As you move forward in your career as a software engineer, I think it’s a good idea to have a healthy portion of CTSQ sauce or seasoning. Imagine if all the engineers that game before were content with how things were. Imagine the tools we’d be using still.
A Good Cook Is Not The Same As A Good Chef
Being a good cook is not the same as being a good chef. Most of us no this by now, but being a good coder/programmer is not the same as being a good engineer. Just because you are good at your craft, if you can’t handle the things that support and surround that craft you are placing a ceiling on yourself.
In the case of being a good chef, you need to know how to manage a kitchen, handle the marketing, and a bunch of other things. With being a good engineer, we have similar parallels. You need to be able to manage and communicate expectations, write code that works with other people, engage in meaningful meetings with the team.
Destroying Toxicity & Bro Culture
Recently Mario Batali was forced to exit his restaurants due to reports of his sexual assaults and misconduct coming to light. I don’t know if we’ve seen the exact parallel within engineering, but i think it’s worth taking a moment to bring up how this is another parallel we should try hard to avoid.
It’s no secret that engineering is very male dominated. Even outside of number of engineers, you often hear behind the back whispers about how so and so it good for a women. With that said, I think as a whole software engineers do a good job on trying to be more inclusive, but there is a long way to go. Some companies succeed at this more than others, but most importantly we shouldn’t stop striving to be better here.
I think toxicity is equally if not more prevalent in engineering than in cooking. It might be the competitive nature in me, but I think in any craft this is natural. When you work day in and day out at a craft, you naturally evaluate your ability to be good at it and if other people are doing the same thing it’s easy to compare. What becomes dangerous is when (1) you let your ego hurt the ultimate goal to produce good software and (2) you aren’t willing to pass it forward, bring other engineers up, and maybe even stifle their growth.
Remember, no matter how skilled you are now, at one point in time someone invested their time helping you grow. This could be in person or just through some blog post. Without those people, where would you be? Let’s learn to pass it forward.
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