Gordon Ramsay and programmers' egos
If you've never watched Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (the British version, not the Fox travesty), you should. Gordon Ramsay visits troubled restaurants and tries to turn them around - sometimes succeeding, sometimes not.
As you watch the episodes, you start to see a few common themes:
Ramsay's advice for pretty much all the restaurants he visits is this: Stick to simple dishes with good, fresh ingredients. He applies this rule to small "hole in the wall" places right up to French restaurants with Michelin stars. And the software equivalent of this looks something like:
As you watch the episodes, you start to see a few common themes:
- Chefs cooking for an imagined audience that doesn't really exist
- Overcomplicated food
- Egos getting in the way of a quality product
- Programmers adding features that make the product harder to use
- Software that is so over-designed that it has lost its flexibility
- Beloved design patterns that don't apply to the task at hand.
Ramsay's advice for pretty much all the restaurants he visits is this: Stick to simple dishes with good, fresh ingredients. He applies this rule to small "hole in the wall" places right up to French restaurants with Michelin stars. And the software equivalent of this looks something like:
- Keep the design obvious so that it can change later on;
- Focus on end-user features ("ingredients"), not programming techniques.
posted by Pete Bevin at
6:21 AM
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