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Thirty years in professional kitchens teaches you things no bootcamp curriculum will ever put on a syllabus. Like how a burn on the forearm stops registering by hour six, or the way you can read a cook's whole day just by how they're gripping the knife at four in the afternoon. Steady hands mean the ticket times are holding. Shaky ones mean somebody's anniversary dinner is about to go sideways, and there's nothing you can do about it from the pass. You learn the plate has to be right before it leaves the kitchen, full stop. Nobody stenciled that on a wall for morale. It's just what happens if you don't: you send out something that sits in your gut the rest of the night, maybe the rest of your career.
I didn't walk away from that life. It walked away from me, and I spent a year pretending I could still keep up.
I cut the tip of my finger off, had surgery to clean it up the next day, and was back at it that afternoon, before the numbness even wore off. That's the job: you just show up, you don't make it a story. A month later the real problem started. The way I was working around that finger blew the ligaments in my knuckle. My grip went. Every time I tried to close my hand around a pot or wring out a cloth, it bit back. I worked around it, then tried to bull through it, until there wasn't anything left to do but stop.
Thirty years on the line in serious kitchens, and it still didn't end with a party or a pretty last service. No write-up, no curtain call. Just me, arguing with a hand that wasn't able to seal the deal anymore, and finally cluing in that it was a fight I couldn't win.
Nobody warned me about the part that came after. In all the anguish of losing the only career I've ever known, I realised it actually wasn't starting over; it was finding different tools with the same artist mind behind them. I've been making things with these hands since I was a kid: stories, food, soap — whatever was in front of me became the art. Cooking just happened to be the one that paid the rent for three decades. So when the kitchen stopped being an option, I discovered I didn't lose myself. I only lost one particular set of tools.
Turns out, the new tool is code.
A bootcamp full of kids half my age, and me, trying to fix a JavaScript file with the same part of my brain that used to save a broken hollandaise thirty seconds before service. Recipe work and debugging are both the same crazy-making process: you take crude raw elements and beat on them until they stop being wrong, until they finally come together into something you can stand behind. Something a stranger who owes you nothing can actually rave about. Mise en place is just sprint planning with more knives. You learn to hold an entire operation in your skull at once and know when it's about to go bad before it does. No course teaches you that. It's fifteen years of expo still running underneath everything.
I also do the thing most developers won't touch: I go into somebody else's mess and fix it. Every kitchen I ever ran, I inherited something broken — whether it was a walk-in nobody bothered to organize or a menu some sous-chef priced out of a dream instead of a spreadsheet. You don't get to complain about it. You fix it and you keep the tickets moving. Same with a codebase somebody walked away from half-finished. I don't care whose name is on the first commit. I care if the thing works when somebody needs it to.
A chef doesn't create a dish and disappear. You watch it go out, and you watch what happens after. A clean plate coming back means it landed. Food coming back means you've got maybe four minutes to fix it before the next table hits the same wall. So when I ship something — whether it's mine, or somebody else's I've taken over — you get support after launch the same way. Tweaks, updates, and digital management are baked into every build. Edible was never the bar in a kitchen I ran. Software that just runs and nothing else doesn't clear it for me either. I genuinely don't know another way to work.
A menu tells you who a restaurant is for. If you leave off substitutions or skip the allergen list, you've decided who doesn't get to eat there, whether you meant to or not. Software does the same thing with contrast, alt text, keyboard navigation — those choices decide who can actually use what you've built. Most of the time, when people get left out, it isn't deliberate; it's just nobody bothering to ask who can't get in the door. I spent thirty years asking that question. I don't know how to stop, and it shows up in the accessibility features baked into every project I ship.
If you want to see what happens when the cooking and the code and everything else land on the same plate at once, go look at naked.chefmyklove.com. Five bucks gets you the browser edition — built the way I build everything now, with hands that have found a new way to put something in front of you I can live with.
Your donations help maintain a sliding scale for our less advantaged patrons. If you have more than you need, there are many who need any extra you can give.
