Datatouille

When people talk about cooking, for example “I like to cook” or “I’m good at cooking,” they’re often referring to preparing a few meals occasionally with a decent result. The difficulty of cooking—like with any activity—doesn’t lie in isolated execution, but in sustaining it over time in a consistent and sustainable way. So, being able to prepare a tasty meal from time to time—as any functional human should—is not the same as feeding a family of 3 or more every day, taking care of things like nutritional value, variety, and availability of breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner, 7 days a week.

Cooking involves logistics, budgeting, planning, physical effort, and consistency. Are we talking about programming?

Being able to code an app is not the same as developing software professionally. The leap is similar to going from making ham and cheese sandwiches at home to working in a restaurant kitchen. As a professional, your work must take into account infrastructure: from estimating processing and storage needs based on user load, to database design—in the case of web apps—to support across platforms, distribution, etc. for local applications.

Functionally, you need to be able to optimize, maintain, extend, and support the software—you have to document and communicate changes and decisions. It’s not enough to just build it; it has to be a predictable and repeatable process to be economically viable.

You also need to consider things like security, regulatory compliance, and service guarantees. And just like in the kitchen, when you go pro, the stakes are different. It’s not about improvising a tasty recipe when inspiration strikes, but about delivering consistent quality under constraints—time, budget, scale, expectations.

Professional software development demands habits, not just skills. It's about designing for change, reducing risk, planning for failure, and leaving things better than you found them. It’s not just writing code that works, but building systems others can trust, understand, and extend.

So, if you love coding and want to make it your craft:

Don’t just cook—learn to run the kitchen.

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