Engineer's 20-Year-Old Recipe Format Goes Viral, Sparks Online Debate
An Engineer's Old Cooking Trick Is Going Viral, Divides the Internet
A recipe format created by software engineer Michael Chu for his website Cooking For Engineers has gone viral after a tweet showcased its column-based layout, which visually links ingredients to steps. The format, built with HTML tables, eliminates the need to scroll through lengthy backstories. Chu, surprised by the attention, explained that his system blends engineering structure with culinary intuition, and many online users praised it as a game-changer, while others questioned its novelty.
Structure and intuition aren’t really opposites at all. A well organized recipe can actually help someone build real understanding of cooking a lot faster.
- alexandrehtrb
The engineer's name is Michael Chu, he made a website with cooking recipes structured as tables.
- piinbinary
Some of my pet peeves about regular cookbooks are:
- Steps that actually include many different steps.
- Steps that don't repeat the quantities, making me scroll back and forth between the step and the quantity list.
The diagrams in this post very cleanly solve both.
- bityard
TFA is mostly just a bunch of twitter screenshots. From people on social media who forgot that the rest of the web still exists. (Original site: https://www.cookingforengineers.com)
Also, clickbait headline: There is no dissent presented anywhere on the page that this recipe format is pretty great. It did not divide the internet even a little.
- mathgeek
Have always loved cookingforengineers. We should really just be linking to it directly instead of whatever this “having to scroll through a life story f other people’s tweets” spam is.
- juancn
This is not new at all: https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
Look at the site design! It went viral on Digg!
That's how old this is.