Fred van Dijk: Communicating complexity

This talk is a long analogy about maintaining and customizing a large web portal.

My father for a long time was cleaning tap installation in bars. I saw both groggy bar owners and Chinese restaurant owners and personnel. Cultural differences.

In the Netherlands, Chinese restaurants are tailored to Dutch tastes, often including some Indonesian tastes. How do you start? You get a building, a kitchen, a dining area, a bar, a takeway. You need to decorate it. You need personnel. He learns that he cannot just build on his own tastes, but needs to adapt to Dutch tastes.

He starts, two months later the city closes the parking lot for reparations, people need to park further away, so less customers. So: challenges, but it works. Food inspection has some comments, gives a fine, but he improves.

But everything has to work all the time, 7 days a week. Kitchen, waitress, bar tender, both takeaway and restaurant, etc.

After a few years he needs to do some maintenance, renovations. But business is slowing down, the people have tasted the food enough, have seen the fishes, there is another nice restaurant. So: a make over. New dishes, extra cooks because he wants to prepare food at the table. Take away in a more separate area. The owner stays as the face of the restaurant, is always there. And it works, he doesn't go bankrupt.

The end.

Let's disect this analogy. This is running a website, what I have been telling you for the past 20 minutes.

The website is the dining area. Or the take away area with the restapi. The building is the hosting environment. There are rules (food inspection). The food is the content. Who are the waiters? The editors. The tables and chairs are the software. Kitchen is backend, dining area is frontend. Website needs to be restyled every few years. So if you have an enterprisey website, you are a restaurant manager. And you don't have everything under control, you have to change with the times. You cannot stay with Python 2 and yarn, you need to go to Python 3 and pnpm.

What we try to pull off, is doing 8 to 10 things together. A website is not easy, it is as complex as a restaurant.

BTW, the restaurant is the Rose Garden in Barneveld.