My wife likes to cook – which is good for me, as I like to eat – and every time I watch her in the kitchen I can’t help but notice the parallels between chefs and programmers.
There are chefs who work for large hotels and conference centres who prepare large banquets for guests and attendees, as well as numerous lunches and snacks throughout the day. This is analogous to the enterprise programmer who works on enterprise scale systems such as accounting and CRM, but who also finds himself having to patch together a myriad of scripts to fulfill the extraneous requirements of of those further up the enterprise food chain. There are also chefs who work in smaller hotels and cafes, providing meals on a, some what, ad hoc basis to passing customers, these chefs are analogous to the smaller coding shops who tend to work on a customer by customer basis. Each, in their own way, striving to find the best ingredients to put together to make a superb dish to delight their customers.
When it comes to ingredients I am fortunate enough to live in an area that constitutes some of the best agricultural land in Scotland; in fact the Carse of Gowrie is famed the world over for the quality of it’s soft fruit (that’s raspberries and the like to you and me). It’s the same when we speak of “ingredients” for applications too, I’m lucky enough to work for a company who provide programmers with some of the best “ingredients” available.
Another parallel I see between chefs and programmers is in books. My wife loves cookbooks, almost as much as I love technical books. Chefs have books that explain everything it takes to run a kitchen, as we have books that explain enterprise architecture. Chefs have speciality books that concentrate on one small facet of cooking and we have similar books in our world. So it is with this in mind that I decided to start two little “books” of my own; the XAF Cookbook and the XPO Cookbook, look out for them in future posts. I hope you enjoy them and that they help you cook up some “tasty dishes” of your own.