Cooking is an integration project

Life recently threw a wrench in the well-oiled machine that is my household. Due to some health issues, my partner needs to rest, meaning the domestic duties that usually land on her plate have shifted to mine.

This includes my nemesis: Cooking.

Give me the "dirty jobs": Taking out the trash, changing diapers and I’m content. But making dinner? That does not spark joy for me. My partner is the chef; I’m usually just the guy who eats the result.

I am stepping up now (like any good partner should)! As she was guiding me through a complex recipe the other day, I had an epiphany: this feels a lot like an integration project… and I’ve seen many of those in my career!

Let me explain.

# Shopping (data hunt)

When you cook, you need ingredients. In the AFK world, you walk into one supermarket, buy everything, and leave. Integrating a planning solution should work the same way. Ideally, your data is neatly stored in a single database, or ERP, ready to be used.

In reality however, your "ingredients" are scattered across a logistical nightmare of many different locations.

• The Grocery Store: Your main ERP.
• The Specialty Shop: That legacy HR system from 1998.
• The Garden: Sticky notes on a monitor.
• Foraging in the Woods: The brain of that one planner who "just knows" which trucks have maintenance issues.

Just like you can’t make a stew without finding the beef, you can’t run an optimization without locating your data. Even if it’s currently living on a piece of paper in someone’s back pocket.

# Mis-en-place (data prep)

After you’ve gathered your ingredients, any good chef (this includes my darling wife) knows what comes next: mis-en-place: Washing vegetables, chopping onions…. putting everything in its place. It’s the quiet work that pays off later, sparing you from stress when the kitchen gets hot.

The biggest issues I had while cooking came from a lack of preparation, I’d just started cooking, then suddenly read “peel 8 potatoes and slice them into bits” while I already had 2 other pans on the stove.

When integrating systems, mis-en-place is the stage where you gather, clean, standardize, and reshape your data before your optimizer even touches it!

Quite often, you’ll want to:

• Resolve Formats: Is 2026-02-01 February 1st or January 2nd? (You usually don’t know until you find a row saying 2026-01-31).
• Validate Constraints: Ensure birthdates aren’t in the future and Country Codes are actually ISO standard.
• Map Identifiers: ensuring CC in one system matches CREDIT_CARD in the other.

This step isn’t fancy or flashy, but it’s essential. Without it, you are making the job much harder for yourself. Just like trying to cook while searching for the garlic you swear you chopped ten minutes ago.

# Sizzling pans and boiling water!

Now comes the part everyone thinks of when they hear “cooking”: the pots, the pans, the boiling water transforming sticks into spagethi. This is where raw ingredients become dinner.

In planning solutions, this is the solving phase. The point where your planning solution takes all that carefully curated data and actually computes something meaningful. Where the chaos of real-world requirements gets melted into a delicious soup of possibilities and solutions.

When things come together, it’s a special feeling. When running an optimization on our Timefold Platform, I sometimes can’t help but stare at our score graph as the solution gets slowly better, burning away all the excessive fat and leaving just the good parts.

# Serving / plating

A meal isn’t done when it leaves the pan; it’s done when it hits the plate in a way that makes people want to pick up a fork. Presentation matters. Feedback matters. And ideally, whoever eats the dish walks away happy.

Similarly, after you have a solved planning problem, you need to present it clearly. Whether you use dashboards, reports, visualizations, or API responses, stakeholders need to understand what changed, why it changed, and what actions they should take.

Basically, you conduct a taste test. This is where reality hits. You serve the plan, and the stakeholder takes a bite.

• “This is great, but…”
• “Bob can’t drive that truck, he’s allergic to manual transmissions.”
• “We actually need this delivered by 4 PM, not 5 PM.”

Just like seasoning a sauce, you take that feedback, adjust the constraints, and iterate. The first plan, like the first pancake, is rarely perfect. But by iterating, the system becomes sharper, smarter, and tastier.

# The takeaway

(the lesson-y one, not the food-y one)

As I’ve been cooking more meals, it’s been clear to me there are so many similarities with integrating software. None of the phases listed above stand alone. The shopping, the prep, the cooking, the plating… each one sets up the next, each one depends on the last.

Planning systems work the same way. Good data unlocks good optimization, good optimization doesn’t say that much without clear presentation, and clear presentation fuels better feedback and iteration. When all those pieces support each other, the result feels less like a sequence of chores.