The Cloud and Batch Size

The cloud seems to have lean effects on software development:

In the Wintel world, new versions of Microsoft Windows came out every few years, with major software projects tied to desktops and laptops. By contrast, in less than five years Apple has announced six versions of its mobile operating system. Google’s operating system for cloud-connected laptops, called Chrome, is updated every six weeks.

Full article here.

Recent Reading

Brooklyn has no farms. So why is it at the center of the farm-to-table food movement?

I love this 9 year old girl. If you ever wondered what the point and power of blogs is, here it is.

Food trucks in...Paris? Yes, and yes they're American, yes the French love them. 

Does making cars more fuel efficient make us use more fuel?

 

When the price of something goes down people will buy more of it. It's one of the first laws of economics, as fundamental as gravity. 

It's best to think of the law on a national or global scale, not a personal one. It's a law that describes large effects. If the price of shrimp goes down by half you might not buy more frozen shrimp for yourself. But, on a global scale, the price of shrimp has dropped in the last couple decades—and people are buying a lot more shrimp.

The law of lower prices has interesting implications in all that we do. Some of the implications are obvious. As cars get cheaper more people can afford them so more are sold. Some implications are less obvious. As calories get cheaper to produce (more food produced per acre and so on) we buy more of them (and get fatter). 

The law of lower prices can have some perverse effects. Consider making cars more fuel efficient. Increased fuel efficiency has the same effect as making gas cheaper; we get more out of our cars for less money. And what happens when we lower the price of gas? On a global scale we use more gas. We use even more than the amount of the efficiency savings in part because second order effects come into play. We extend our commutes to suburbs where houses use more energy. We use the money we saved on gas to buy things that consume gas. In other words, making cars more fuel efficient makes us use more gas.

That and many more difficult to swallow environmental issues are in the book I just read, The Conundrum, whose painful subtitle reads How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.

Drank No. 12: Preserving Fruits with Liquor

 

Also below:
 
What's the difference between Apple Brandy and Bonded Apple Brandy?

A Case for Punch

  

Preserving Fruits with Liquor

At 2011's Manhattan Cocktail Classic I took a class on preserving fruits in alcohol. It was the most interesting class I attended. If there was one thing I took away it’s that any bar should be thinking about doing this, especially one in a fruit-growing state like Michigan.

Preserving is different than infusing. Infusing — adding fruits or aromatics to alcohol and letting them mingle at room temperature — creates a certain kind of flavor effect. When the alcohol is gone, however, the fruit is basically inedible. (Maraschino cherries are preserved, not infused. If you've ever tasted some "home made" ones that are bitter, alcoholic and nasty, chances are they were infused, not preserved.)

Preserving fruits with liquor is like canning but using alcohol instead of water. There's usually sugar and spices and some cooking involved. When you're done everything is usable. Use the alcohol in drinks. The preserved fruits go in drinks, in desserts and so on.

There are plenty of recipes for preserved fruits out there on the internets. But I also took down ten notes that seemed important and might not be covered in any recipe:

1. Start with pint canning jars, not quarts. That way you can test lots of different recipes.
2. Once you open a jar you need to use it up in two weeks.
3. You will fail more than succeed in the first year.
4.  It’s expensive so be conservative.
5.  Use stone fruits that are slightly under ripe, that way they fall apart less.
6.  Strawberries and plums are good, but they will get so soft they’ll only be good for muddling.
7. Vegetables and cocktails almost never go together.
8. Follow the latest USDA canning guidelines for temperatures and sanitation. Botulism is the main danger.
9. If you are in a restaurant have the kitchen chef in a restaurant supervise the process, not the bartenders. (No offense, bartenders.)
10. Jars blow up sometimes.

 

What's the difference between Apple Brandy and Bonded Apple Brandy?

Laird’s is the last distiller of apple brandy in America. The old name for apple brandy was applejack (or Jersey lightning). Wherever you see applejack in a recipe you can use Laird’s bonded, it’s the same thing.

Bonded Apple Brandy is Laird’s name for traditional applejack made with 100% apples. The other version, simply called Laird’s Apple Brandy, is made with only 35% apple brandy; the rest is blended neutral spirits (AKA white lightning).

A Case for Punch

Preserved fruits make a good mix with punch. In fact, the opening drink served at class was punch and, while I find most punches boring as hell, this was one of the top two drinks of my weekend. Each glass had a small slice of nectarine that had been preserved in Cointreau. The nectarine was soft, silky, perfumed, almost naughty.

The instructors made a case for punch that finally sold me on it. When you throw a party and want your guests to have a drink as soon as they take off their jackets punch does the trick. It can handle a mob of arrivals that would crush a bar making drinks to order. They recommended settling a giant hunk of ice in the middle of the punch bowl. As it melts the flavor of the punch changes, the architecture of the evening follows suit. 

There are several bars in New York and San Francisco doing punch service either at bar or table side. And one in Ann Arbor. (None are preserving their own fruits that I know of; that game is wide open.) Punch was a very popular way to drink in America until the early 20^th Century. After that it faded into prom nights and kitsch. Old cocktail books often have whole sections devoted to it. It fits nicely into the flow of traditional American food. Plus the food cost is awesome.

David Wondrich wrote a book on punch that I talked about here.

Biographies, Jobs, Apple and Lean

 

For some reason or other I've been on a bit of a biography kick recently. I read Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood Bones and Butter (great writing, especially in the Blood section), Keith Richards' Life (only read it if you really care about the Stones). I even got to see Harry Belafonte interviewed live by Charlie Rose about his new biography, My Song (don't miss Harry if you ever get the chance). Most recently I closed the cover on Bob Dylan's Chronicles, which has unmatched art and mood.

I also read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. To be honest, even though I read regularly about Apple, I was wary of this book. It came bearing loads of hype, most of it for obvious reasons. There were many book reviews that focused on the personality of Jobs, especially his potent dickishness (spoiler alert! he is often a monumental asshole!). Then there's the story about his first daughter and Joan Baez and his wacky diets and yada yada yada. I feared the dirt would outnumber the diamonds. Any way I cut it, though, Jobs turned out to be a powerful book.

Steve Jobs is not promoted as a business book. I certainly didn't read it expecting to glean anything that could relate to my company. But it is and I did. (That's one of the reasons the book is so powerful—it's really several books and stories combined in one, written masterfully.)

Jobs was quoted many times as saying he wanted to create a great business, not just a great product. There are a number of examples on how he did that but two really struck me, especially as they relate to some Toyota manufacturing's lean concepts.

The first was about visioning. Under Jobs the Apple leadership team had a long term visioning meeting every Monday. Not just once a decade (what we do at Zingerman's for our ZCoB-wide vision), not once a year (as many individual businesses do at Zingerman's), but once a week. In part this was driven by the industry they were in. Technology moves fast so I guess visions should too. But they weren't talking about what was going to happen in six months or a year. This was a vision meeting for the next ten years, talking about what's way on the horizon. The meeting didn't last for a few minutes. Visioning wasn't just an agenda item where someone talked briefly. It was an entire meeting itself. It could go on for hours. They practiced visioning frequently and regularly—by reducing its batch size and interval. And they turned out machines that were many steps ahead of everyone else with fewer problems. I think the two things are very much related.

The second example was about product development iteration. Jobs had a daily check-in on product development. He visited design director Jony Ive and his team every afternoon to see how things had gone since yesterday. During this visit they didn't look at drawings or images on a computer. They held an object. A prototype of the thing they were designing. The group would play with it, talk about it, make tweaks. Then he'd come back the next day.

Now I've been designing for a long time and am fully cocooned in it. I fully appreciate that this may be one of those things where most folks will say, "Yeah, so?" But I'll just say this kind of shit just does not happen elsewhere, anywhere. A design director might see a new prototype once a month. If it's a fast moving project, maybe once a week. But once a day—no way.

Take in the sheer number of iterations. Let's say the iPhone had 3 years of development. Take away vacations and weekends (which I doubt there were many of) and you've still got around 750 design iterations for the iPhone. I doubt if any of Motorola's phones have a quarter that many. That means Apple gave itself at least 4 times as many chances as Motorola to get things right. It wasn't a coincidence that they made a great phone. Yes, they had talented people and Jobs was a stickler for detail (though to some extent I think it's overstated—every designer I know is a stickler for detail; if they weren't they wouldn't be in the business). But forget Ive and Jobs for a moment. They're not the only thing that made such an amazing device. It wasn't a hero product, one that came down from the Creator on the Mountain. It was a sisyphean labor of iterations, albeit one with better results.

In lean terms, they practiced go see — the idea that you have to stand in front of the real thing to understand problems. They also modified it frequently. To put that in lean speak, they reduced the batch size of design by going to daily iterations, not monthly. In doing so they got a better product with fewer errors. Sound familiar?

More signs of the times

 

More food trucks...and trailers...and buses...from South by Southwest. Pig Vicious—love it! Hat tip to Kristie.

A symbol of...what?

I do not think this word means what you think it means.