[HN Gopher] Modeling chopping onions: The importance of mise en ...
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Modeling chopping onions: The importance of mise en place
Author : jwithington
Score : 34 points
Date : 2022-02-28 14:34 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (app.hex.tech)
(TXT) w3m dump (app.hex.tech)
| bern4444 wrote:
| Mise En Place is very helpful as anyone who begins to practice it
| can attest.
|
| The other critical part of cooking (which IMO applies to other
| jobs, roles etc) is cleaning as you go - one of the first things
| taught in cooking school.
|
| I personally hate cleaning up after I finish eating so I try and
| clean and put everything away before I sit down.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I spent a few years working in a kitchen, and those are the two
| items I took away myself - before I start cooking I clear out
| the dish rack, and then I have a sink full of soap and water
| and most of the chopping is done before I even turn on the
| stove-top.
| jwithington wrote:
| Cleaning as you go also probably has the same impact as mise en
| place--driving down process variability. Less things that can
| get in your way.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Both principles indeed apply to all sorts of jobs!
|
| Cleaning as you go also reduces variability and total time
| spent. Cleaning naturally consumes short spans of otherwise-
| useless idle time between tasks. It also enables pipelining of
| multiple jobs. I also prefer to clean up before eating, and
| that usually takes just enough time for the meal to cool down
| to the right temperature if I was cleaning as I go.
| klyrs wrote:
| I have a strong desire to refactor code as I read it. I tend
| to avoid this behavior because (a) most codebases are in need
| of _so much_ cleanup, and (b) I like to keep commits small
| and topical. Perhaps I should re-evaluate how I weight these
| factors.
| lqet wrote:
| > You think you can outsmart the recipe and chop the peppers
| while the onions are cooking. [...] The bell peppers need to make
| it into the skillet by the 3 minute mark after the onions are in
| or else the dish is ruined.
|
| How so? Just move the skillet from the heat and let the onions
| sit there for as long as it takes to chop the bell peppers. If
| anything, they will be more aromatic.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| Even though there's no direct heat it will continue to cook.
| turkishlurker wrote:
| Assembly in auto plants relies on a parts bundling/feeding
| process that begins in advance, analogous to mise en place and
| cooking.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| This page can't scroll in safari?
| tantalor wrote:
| > The bell peppers need to make it into the skillet by the 3
| minute mark after the onions are in or else the dish is ruined.
|
| This is not a realistic assumption.
| jwithington wrote:
| It's not, but trying to keep things simple. Could have been
| something like cooking a steak in a pan where timing is
| everything.
| nemoniac wrote:
| Below is a quote from Anthony Bourdain's book "Kitchen
| Confidential"
|
| I keep the quote at the top of my emacs config file.
|
| Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks. Do not fuck
| with a line cook's 'meez' -- meaning his setup, his carefully
| arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened
| butter, cooking oil, wine, backups, and so on. As a cook, your
| station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an
| extension of your nervous system... The universe is in order when
| your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to
| find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during
| the course of the shift is at the ready at arm's reach, your
| defenses are deployed. If you let your mise-en-place run down,
| get dirty and disorganized, you'll quickly find yourself spinning
| in place and calling for backup. I worked with a chef who used to
| step behind the line to a dirty cook's station in the middle of a
| rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He'd
| press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with
| peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, bread crumbs and
| the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a
| station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side towel.
| "You see this?" he'd inquire, raising his palm so that the cook
| could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef's
| palm. "That's what the inside of your head looks like now."
|
| -- Anthony Bourdain, from Kitchen Confidential.
| tepitoperrito wrote:
| At the risk of sounding crass and embarrassing myself, here's
| the quote I keep at the top of my emacs config file:
|
| ;;; init.el --- welcome to church
|
| ;; Well then get your shit together. Get it all together, and
| put
|
| ;; it in a backpack, all your shit, so it's together. And if
| you
|
| ;; gotta take it somewhere, take it somewhere. You know? Take
| it to
|
| ;; the shit store and sell it. Or put it in a shit museum, I
| don't
|
| ;; care what you do, you just gotta get it together.
|
| ;; Get your shit together.
|
| -- Morty, from Rick and Morty
| titzer wrote:
| I feel this way about UIs that are never stable enough and not
| configurable enough for us rubes to be trusted laying it out
| how we want.
|
| Software is so flexible, yet we can't make UIs the way we want
| and are constantly subjected to the whims of designers and the
| buffets of fads. No way anyone becomes a master of using
| software because software apparently doesn't want that.
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| Because there's the constant struggle of making something so
| complicated that nobody wants to actually configure it and
| use it. So you have two options: sensible defaults and hiding
| things away, or just avoiding customization outright. And the
| second is always cheaper (for commercial products).
| politician wrote:
| It's a failure of the UI and windowing frameworks to enable
| this level of programmable personalization. Designers chasing
| fads are just the opportunists that fill the gaps left by
| Apple's rigid design ethos, Microsoft's random gyrations, and
| Linux's ever-delayed Year of the Desktop.
|
| As ridiculous as it first sounds, VR will likely provide the
| technology for the way forward.
| giglamesh wrote:
| Line cooking in a restaurant is very different than cooking at
| home. Mis-en-place is usually not efficient for the home cook.
| The example cited by Jeff W is contrived. I've cooked at least
| hundreds if not thousands of onions at home and in restaurants
| and in almost every case I was chopping carrots or celery or
| peppers while those onions were cooking and never once did I
| have a failure due to timing.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I was a line cook for over a decade too and cook a lot at
| home obviously. Mise just looks different at home but it
| still happens. I still get out my cutting board and hone my
| knife before I start peeling the carrots you know.
|
| I've always thought of the goal of mise being a sort of
| process fluidity rather than raw efficiency. Especially with
| tasks that can't be done simultaneously it's not going to
| shave much if any time off. But it still leads to less things
| to keep track of, fewer context switches, smoother
| transitions, fewer mistakes, more opportunity to notice and
| account for variations, etc.
|
| You also have to remember that you have the skills and
| accompany judgement of a once-professional cook. You can cut
| the celery before the onions burn, but can you cut it before
| the _garlic_ burns? Could a home cook without a professional
| background?
|
| It's not that one of those options is "mise en place" and
| then others aren't. The answers depend on the person doing
| the cooking, and making that call is part of the mise process
| for the dish. Having a plan, basically.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| I don't know. I've found mis-en-place to be a great help when
| cooking at home and I've never worked as a cook in a
| restaurant or caterer. It helps with timing and it is also
| just nice to feel like the cook itself is simply "going
| downhill."
|
| Now, for qualifiers, I live in a full house so things aren't
| always where I left them (so simply removing searches is
| useful) and I do cooks both small (just my meal) and large
| (for the whole group or pre-cooking meals for the work week).
| thehappypm wrote:
| I have never heard of mis-en-place but I have always done it
| in my home cooking in order to have a better flow. Chop, then
| move on from chopping to the next thing; the next thing;
| don't bounce back and forth. It's just how my brain functions
| best. I would hate to be sauteing onions and in the back of
| my mind be "gotta chop the peppers in 2 minutes shit". Plus I
| like to clean when I have downtime, so if I have two minutes
| I'll wash my cutting boards and stuff.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| It's quite a nice reminder at the top of an emacs config.
|
| It's basically the same thing as 5S methodology in
| manufacturing. Doesn't make as much sense in a garage
| workshop, but when what you're doing is the pride of your
| craft and your day-in-day-out, your setup and tooling should
| be dialed enough that you almost never have to think about
| it.
| lqet wrote:
| This is an amazing website. While it looks very minimalistc,
| every paragraph is in _11_ nested divs and a final <p>, all with
| arcane IDs, classnames, and individual styling. Nearly 5 MB of
| JavaScript are required. Google Lighthouse only reports
| preliminary scores because it times out.
|
| The one-line paragraph "Most of the time you're good! But you end
| up ruining 23.15% of your shakshukas. Whoops." requires no less
| than 3.1 kB of data, still 1.2 kB when gzipped.
|
| Also, selecting text is impossible, and I am not sure if that is
| intended or just the browser giving up.
| phailhaus wrote:
| This is not a simple website, looks like it's served on a
| platform called Hex. While this particular page is light on
| content, the platform seems optimized for more complex
| usecases.
| jasonkillian wrote:
| Happened to see this thread on HN, (and disclaimer I'm an
| engineer at Hex) very cool project jwithington!
|
| Wanted to take a second to address your comment about
| performance, lqet. All your points are absolutely fair - I
| personally apologize for some of those layers of divs and some
| of that JS as they're definitely my fault!
|
| For context, Hex lets you write Python and SQL code in a
| notebook-esque format and then create apps from that to share
| across the web. So there's actually quite a breadth of
| functionality we need to support under the hood that adds to
| frontend complexity. We also revamped our whole app-building
| experience recently, so there's a couple straggling bugs (like
| the text selection one you mentioned, whoops!).
|
| But I totally agree with you - thinking about all that JS makes
| me wince a little haha as we definitely care and want to
| improve frontend performance. We plan to make better use of
| code-splitting and lazy-loading of JS so that the frontend code
| for more complex apps is only pulled in if/when necessary. (We
| also want to work on building better tooling to make analysis
| of code-splitting effectiveness easier - we've found that a lot
| of existing webpack bundle analyzer tools don't provide enough
| visibility for our use cases. Maybe an open source project for
| us one day!) And we want to decrease over-the-wire data size
| and reduce necessary network calls so you can get a faster
| initial load. We're a small team, so can't make promises when
| exactly this will all happen, but hopefully with these changes
| and other improvements things will feel a bit snappier someday
| soon
| jwithington wrote:
| That's interesting. It's a data workspace platform called Hex.
| It's really something more like a Jupyter Notebook than a
| simple webpage.
|
| I wrote some python code that's generating those charts. You're
| right that's overkill for what it ended up being.
|
| I initially played around with giving the reader the ability to
| set their onion chopping time and see how it played out. It was
| getting a little complicated for the point I was trying to make
| I think.
|
| EDIT: I've added that in now, which helps make it a little more
| fun I think.
| saurik wrote:
| FWIW on iOS 12.4 it doesn't do anything and just renders
| immediately as a white page. On iOS 13.5 it takes longer but
| then gives me an error message "something went wrong / try
| again" which I presume is from the page (not the browser). On
| iOS 14.0~b1 it took a while to think (showing an awkward
| loading progress indicator that I am used to only seeing from
| Google's ridiculous blogging platform) but then loaded the
| page! Only, I can't scroll... well, _vertically_ : / I
| awkwardly CAN scroll horizontally (though only by a bit).
| Reader view, "of course", doesn't work, because this website is
| too "awesome" to allow that. I am now waiting for an iOS 15+
| device to charge in the hope I might be able to... actually, I
| don't remember what the article was supposed to be about
| anymore? Onions or something? (edit: OK, so iOS 15.1 was
| finally able to render the content, with vertical scrolling!)
| klyrs wrote:
| This is an allegory for AOT vs JIT compilation. AOT decreases
| jitter. JIT reduces startup latency (counting AOT compilation
| time).
|
| In terms of project planning, a single cook using strict _mise en
| place_ is Waterfall. When I cook, I aim for a more agile
| approach. Always cut onions into their own bowl first (for pretty
| much everything I cook). If the prep-time for the next
| ingredient(s) is long enough that I 'd burn the onions, they go
| into a second bowl. But when I'm part-way through getting that
| second bowl prepped, I'll get the onions going. If I'm working on
| a new recipe, I'm more inclined to prepare further ahead, or I'll
| have a failed dish... but next time I make it, I'll have more
| confidence to multiplex cooking and prepping.
| jwithington wrote:
| Yes!! Exactly.
| thehappypm wrote:
| This is a terrific metaphor.
|
| Mis-en-place at home cooking only works if you have a very,
| very detailed recipe. Just like waterfall -- if you're gonna
| just full steam ahead on a project you gotta know what you're
| working towards. Any missing detail (forgot the garlic! Forgot
| to think about an edge case!) can derail the recipe/project.
|
| Agile is more like a stir fry, you chop up some onions and
| throw them in, then see what else you got, all one step a time,
| and evolve and taste as you go.
| bena wrote:
| For all of those people complaining about "the 3 minute mark",
| not only are you arguing the metaphor, but you're leaving out
| context.
|
| > "While you're a home chef, you are really particular about your
| shakshuka."
|
| So the dish isn't ruined by most practical measures, but it's
| ruined according to the person making it. And maybe they don't
| want it to be more aromatic.
|
| So regardless if it's a reasonable assumption or not, we can
| agree that sometimes we run into problems in even simple things
| that cause things to run over. And those overruns can cause
| catastrophic failures in other parts of a project.
|
| And the way to prevent those simple problems from causing
| overruns, is to prepare that work beforehand.
| [deleted]
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| So, really the article is "The importance of mise-en-place ...
| if you are really particular about your shakshuka".
| Shared404 wrote:
| Do software people really find it strange that people want to
| have all their tools and workspace set up in a particular way
| in advance and it makes them more efficient?
|
| _Really?_
|
| I bet most of us here could go on for a while about the
| customization that we've made and just _have_ to have.
|
| So the precise example is a bit off, pretend it's a steak.
| Done.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Do you really find it strange that some software people
| just think of food as calories? As fuel? And that slightly
| "overcooked" bell peppers just isn't a good reason to
| optimize for taste, when it is just as reasonable to
| optimize for time?
|
| I optimize my cooking for _time_. I 'll make a chili. I
| have a crock pot that can be put directly on the burner. So
| I can throw in the onions and get them caramelized while I
| chop the peppers. After them I add the herbs, then meat,
| then take it off the burner and put it in the crockpot
| heater, and leave it for the next morning, at which point I
| have ten days of chili. And it taste real fucking good _to
| me_.
|
| My desktop, keybindings, automation, etc, sure: mise-en-
| place. Because I am a software engineer not a chef.
|
| That's really the point I was failing to make: mise-en-
| place has its time and its place.
| Shared404 wrote:
| And many people see computers just as the magic internet
| box.
|
| If all you see the article as is info on cooking, I'm of
| the opinion that you're missing the point.
|
| The last line of the article points this out - mise-en-
| place is about optimizing for consistency/efficiency in
| $THING_YOU_CARE_ABOUT
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Sure. Like I worked at a company that spent months on
| design docs and design reviews. Like that? Everything was
| nicely set up. It was great. Super effective.
|
| Because software is just about following repeatable
| recipes to produce identical results, day after day after
| day?
|
| I agree that having one tools organized is a good idea. I
| disagree with the rest of it. Specifically I don't think
| cooking is a useful analogy, because it is the antithesis
| of software development.
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(page generated 2022-02-28 23:02 UTC)