Being a software engineer is very similar to being a chef.

If you're a chef, you go to school and you learn about different ingredients. You might learn what a squash tastes like, and where certain ingredients fit well with other ingredients.

The parallel in software engineering is that you might learn what a database is, and why you use it. You might understand the cloud and understand how the cloud functions and operates.

In the day to day of a chef, they are asked to make a variety of different dishes for the customers that come into their restaurant.

Engineers in their day to day are either given, or organically think about, features that they want to create. They then take what they have learned and they mix & match those learnings to apply it in real life.

Similar to how a chef knows you normally need eggs, flour and milk if you're going to bake a cake, if you're building a web app, a software engineer knows that you need a frontend, a backend and you need to host it somewhere. And you’ll need a database for storage.

Yes, you could make a different type of cake, you could make red velvet, you could make carrot cake, you could make funfetti. What the cake looks like, what it tastes like will be different, but it's still a cake.

And that's the same with websites. Someone's website for their accounting practice might be different than the website that hosts ChatGPT, but the internal fundamentals that go into both are exactly the same.

And similar to how a chef is very creative in how they make their dishes, being an engineer is an incredibly creative field.

You can think about different ways that you want to implement the code, there's optimizations you can make to make your code run faster, and there's decisions you can make on the architecture backend that make your system more performant and durable.

There's also different types of restaurants and different types of software companies. I'm not going to go into the details of that analogy, but I really think that thinking about software engineering as a parallel to the culinary world is very helpful.

In terms of how AI is impacting all of this, if you were making a carbonara in the past, you would need to get all the ingredients yourself.

You would need to chop up the pancetta, you would need to chop up the onion. You would need to boil the pasta, and do all those steps.

Now, you can act like a supervisor and say, hey AI, I want a carbonara, and it will make it for you.

If you don't know what a carbonara is, AI is not going to help you, but if you do and you know that you like it, it's great because it speeds up that cooking process for you.