When the chef cooks at home

Chefs usually manage “large” kitchens. They have a few cooks and have to deal with a constant flow of dishes they need to dispatch on time. It’s not just cooking, it’s the whole process: from designing the recipe, getting the raw food, and cooking, to serving it on time, hiring, firing, company financials…. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to handle all of that.

In software companies, things are pretty similar. It’s not just the product; it’s designing, developing, keeping everything up, serving customers, and so on.

Chefs also cook at home, small dishes maybe, just for their families, or something they want to test. They do what (and this is a guess) they love and what pushed them to become chefs in the first place: creating good food.

On weekends, I wake up at 6:00 AM so I have a few hours to work/learn on whatever I want before everyone else wakes up. It’s my "cook for my family" time, but in this case, I don’t do anything for them; I code without the constraints of the production environment. I do it for myself, to test new things or just enjoy it.

I’m working on a project using an ESP32, a small microcontroller with super limited resources (if you compare it with a modern laptop), but it has everything: connectivity, storage, a little bit of RAM, a pretty decent ARM processor, and good toolchain and library support.

So, I wake up, make myself a large coffee, and start coding my own data compressor to store GPS positions in the most efficient way so I can review the laps I do with my “racecar”. No AI, just Vim and g++.