[muzani]

One of my favorite jobs is barista at a coffee cart at a university. Cooking puts you in constant flow, unlike coding where you're almost never in flow.

You get to optimize things like crazy. Instead of chopping garlic into little pieces, crushing it removes the acrid taste but keeps the odor. Using butter to toast burger buns instead of margarine basically doubles the quality. There's a timing & liquid quantity window for brewing tea, where you get the best tea.. though sometimes if you're making tea with milk, you want more tannins. The variations of tea also have more impact than variations of coffee. But probably because tea is cheap, it's not as much of a snob sport.

Eggs are incredibly interesting too. It's both beginner tier and mastery tier. It's your hackerrank equivalent - make spaghetti carbonara, make a french omelette, make poached eggs, make egg sushi.

I think it's sad that it's a minimum wage job and never attracts the kind of people who like to optimize things, besides the cafe niches.

[muzani]

besides the cooking, the fun part about being a barista were all the young intelligent college folks you get to talk to, who were not yet cynical about life