I prefer cooking over coding... sometimes

There, I said it.

Doesn't mean I'm very good at the former though... I am probably pretty average. It's a slightly dangerous confession for someone who spends most of his days in front of a screen, writing functions, reviewing pull requests, and thinking in diagrams. This is not a resignation letter to computer science. Nor is it a dramatic shift in career plans.

It is simply an observation about how different it feels to create in a kitchen versus creating in an IDE.

When I cook, feedback is immediate: the onions hit the pan and begin to sizzle; the smell changes within seconds; the sauce thickens visibly. You taste, you adjust, you taste again. Your senses are involved at every step. The loop between action and result is short and honest.

In coding, the loop is longer and far more abstract. You write something. You run it. It compiles... or it (often) does not. The tests pass... or they fail in a place you did not even touch. Sometimes it works locally but not in staging. Sometimes it works in staging but not in production. The feedback arrives through logs, error messages, metrics, or angry customer support tickets.

And then there is the frustration.

When cooking, mistakes are usually understandable. Too much salt, not enough heat or too much of it. The cause is visible and a fix is often possible.

In programming, frustration often comes from invisible layers like a dependency conflict or a version mismatch. A package that worked yesterday but breaks today after an update. You can spend an hour debugging only to discover the issue had nothing to do with your logic, but a compatibility issue introduced by someone else somewhere.

You do not worry about compatibility when cooking. As I read it somewhere else: carrots don't suddenly stop grating because the grater is running a newer version, or you suddenly need to buy a new stove because your egg has retired support for your current one.

There is also something deeply tangible about cooking. At the end of it, you have a warm plate that you can taste and share.

Software, more often than not, disappears into systems. It runs quietly on servers. It becomes part of an interface. Its success is measured in performance improvements and user retention. Meaningful, certainly, but less grounded.

Cooking is also more forgiving. A small typo can cascade into a runtime error that halts everything. In the kitchen, small imperfections rarely destroy the whole dish. The process allows for improvisation without catastrophic failure. In fact, sometimes improvisation often leads to many happy surprises, that you can't reproduce because you dosed your ingredients and seasoning with "whatever feels good." Though, you shouldn't do that with baking. Often more than not, I feel like baking looks more like chemistry than cooking.

None of this means coding is lesser. Programming is creative. Designing a clean architecture feels elegant and rewarding in its own way. Solving a complex bug can be deeply satisfying. There is beauty in logic that fits together perfectly.

But cooking reminds me why I enjoy creating in the first place.

It is immediate. It is human. It engages more than just the analytical part of my brain. And, perhaps most importantly, it is rarely derailed by something as trivial and infuriating as a compatibility issue or a typo.