<story><title>Software Mise En Place</title><url>https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/software-mise-en-place/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisdbanks</author><text>For me, &amp;quot;Mise en place&amp;quot;, has nothing to do with chopping everything beforehand and in fact that is completely different from how I cook and develop software. Chopping everything at the start seems like it takes longer.&lt;p&gt;I think Mise en place can mean different things to different people. The way I was taught it was to have everything &amp;quot;in place&amp;quot; before you start. Literally you gather all the ingredients in one place (on a metal tray) before you start cooking. This has three main benefits:
1) you make sure you have everything you need;
2) you don&amp;#x27;t forget to add anything as you go because at the end your tray should be empty;
3) you don&amp;#x27;t mess up timings by searching for something while you&amp;#x27;re cooking that you can&amp;#x27;t find;
Thus I use Mise en place, but I don&amp;#x27;t chop everything at the start. I chop the onion and then start cooking it, and then chop the other ingredients. Chopping everything else upfront would make the process slower.&lt;p&gt;Similarly in software development I often save simple tasks for when I need mental relief from a hard task. Working on a simple task can often give you the space you need for your brain to solve the hard task it&amp;#x27;s working on in the background.&lt;p&gt;Doing all the simple tasks up front does not seem to me like a good approach to cooking or software development, but making sure you know what all the ingredients are and have them all ready, does.</text></comment>
<story><title>Software Mise En Place</title><url>https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/software-mise-en-place/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>elcapitan</author><text>&amp;gt; You don’t start prepping one vegetable while another is already cooking.&lt;p&gt;I actually do that all the time - different ingredients have different densities and different cooking times, so it makes total sense to start cooking the harder ones while cutting the softer ones (e.g. when making a Minestrone soup). Or you want an onion&amp;#x2F;garlic&amp;#x2F;tomato base to break down before inserting other ingredients that should only cook shortly and retain their texture.</text></comment>