Great Software is Like a Rice Cooker

The history of the rice cooker — the most important piece of hardware that we have in our kitchen! We have used one, religiously, multiple times a day.

The automatic rice cooker is a mid-century Japanese invention that made a Sisyphean culinary labor as easy as measuring out grain and water and pressing a button. These devices can seem all-knowing.

So long as you add water and rice in the right proportions, it’s nearly impossible to mess up, as the machines stop cooking at exactly the right point for toothsome rice. But creating an automatic rice cooker was not so easy. In fact, it took decades of inventive leaps, undertaken by some of the biggest names in Japanese technology.

It really is magical and when it works, it works. I think good software behaves very similarly; effective software feels magical and doesn’t allow the customer to fail (or will go to great lengths to ensure that failure can’t easily happen).