In cooking, the term “mise en place” is essentially preparing the ingredients for a dish before you begin cooking. I was fixing a curtain rod and used the term as a way of saying “I should have gathered all of the necessary things ahead of time.” This got me to thinking and I’ve been having fun thinking about it, and I’m curious what different kinds of answers maybe others might have for it -
What equivalents are there of this in digital spaces?
Putting everything I need for a project in a folder with a readme at the top level:
- Alleviates having to browse or search for files each time I use them
- Stashing any relevant commands, file paths, tutorial URLs in the readme, even if it looks ugly so I don’t have to keep scrolling through my bash history
Amusingly there is a tool for development called mise
And it so happens I discovered it and installed it yesterday, out of frustration with asdf.
Doing your research beforehand instead of diving in and working it out as you go (extends beyond the digital space as well). Probably less fun, but far more efficient, bop those known unknowns people.
“I should have gathered all of the necessary things ahead of time.”
Also known as a staging area.
A very rough sysadmin equivalent in my mind is infrastructure-as-code, like having a base system configuration pushed out via ansible that manual configurations can be made on top of. Saves all the preparatory busywork, equivalent to chopping your mirepoix in advance.
Mise en place directly translates to having a password manager.
Instead of resetting your passwords every time because it’s impossible to remember all your logins (and exhausting to try) just have them in one place instead of scrambling each time.
