Working Clean

I like to watch cooking shows on TV. I'm not the most adventurous eater, but I get a vicarious thrill out of watching people make things I would probably never try.

The other day I ended up watching a Pastry Chefs' Competition and it was mesmerizing. In these competitions, the chefs make huge sculptures out of melted sugar. They blow and twist the sugar like glass and dress it up with all sorts of decorations. Right before final judging they have to lift their delicate Rube Goldberg-esque sculptures off their work tables and carry them over to the judging table. Often they don't make it without a train wreck.. shattered sugar fins and gangly shapes everywhere. I haven't been reduced to hunting through the guide for Pastry Chefs' shows just to see the crashes, but it's tempting. I guess it is like watching auto racing, but knowing that no one will be hurt.

One other thing that I liked about the Pastry Chef's competition was the way that the chefs were judged. There was more to it than just the final judging. All during the preparation, judges walked from station to station with clipboards, making little notes. One of the criteria that they used was working clean. Imagine that.. working clean.. The judges were watching to make sure that the chefs rubbed clean every bowl and utensil immediately after use. If they didn't, well, they were marked off.

I've never worked in a professional kitchen, but I can see where working clean would be very important. If you wipe down a knife right after you use it, it's there, poised and ready for whatever you need to use it for next.

There's a great book out called Kitchen Confidential out by a chef named Tony Bourdain. In it, he describes what he calls the culinary underbelly of the restaurant business. Some of it is kind of scary, but some of it is kind of interesting.. you get a sense of what it is really like to be a line cook in a restaurant, and surprise surprise, it's nothing like what you might see on Emeril.

There's an section in the book where he talks about what cooks do late at night after the customers have gone home. They generally do what many people after work, they go out for beers and sit around talking about work, but what do they talk about really? Tony says that the subject that always comes up is something called mis en place. Mis en place is a blanket term for how you set up your station. Is your tub of butter at the eleven o'clock position or at the one o'clock? Do you have two paring knives, and do you keep them next to your cutting board or next to your garnish bin? When you spend the night churning out meals, these decisions make a difference. Everyone has their favorite theory about the proper miz. Tony says that many cooks get downright mystical about it. According Tony, you'd better run if you are caught messing with another cook's miz. Sharp knives have multiple uses, apparently.

I hate to draw comparisons between work in different professions, because often they miss, but I do think that we need these two concepts in software development: working clean and mis en place. Working clean, well there's a lot to say about that. We throw the term refactoring around a lot in the industry, but there's more to working clean than just refactoring. There's all of the micro work we do when we edit, and there's also the issue of what we do between editing sessions: what the code should look like over here before we stop and edit over there, for instance.

I think mis en place applies to us too, but not in a very straightforward way. If we wanted to form a direct analogy we'd say that our miz is our tools setup.. what our keyboard mappings are, what Eclipse plugins we use. But, I think that misses the point.. Cooks, well, the things they make go out the swinging doors; they seldom come back. In software development, most of our work happens in the context of code we've written before. To me, that means that our existing code is our mis en place and the way that it is structured really matters.

Personally, I think these things are part of the craft, and they are worthy of fevered discussion at the end of the day. I hope it happens on your team.

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