My friends and I love baking.

When we have free time during the semester or we just want a break from the stress of academics, we gather supplies, meet up in a kitchen, and bake. When we all separate and head to our warm homes for holiday breaks, my newsfeed is basically Pintrest, filled with images of the delicious goodies my friends have made.

I’m not entirely sure why we all love baking—thats probably the subject of another post, another day. (My sister thinks its mainly because we like eating the food we make, which isn’t false).

But I know I like to do it because it has the core principles of another one of my favorite things to do—code. Without the all sugary goodness of course.

1. You have a certain set of ingredients you can use and build something from the ground up.
   To bake cookies you need flour, eggs, milk, and sugar. The ingredients for coding could be to something as basic as the characters used to type out a program or the primitive types of a given language or the set of languages, data structures, etc a person knows. Either way, the point is you start out with somethings that are nothing on their own.
2. And for that reason, you’re in power.
   You’re able to call something into being that didn’t exist before! That is pretty cool. And makes you feel like singing “I’ve got the POWER!”
3. You can follow a recipe and Google the answers.
   Because as we all know, Stack Overflow and Allrecipes are basically the same websites. But in actuality, our first programs and our first batches of cookies were based on guidelines posted online. We can put the ingredients for a chocolate chip cookie in so many ways (“soft and chewy” or “old-fashioned” or even, audaciously, “best EVER”) just like there are tons of ways to write binary search (recursive, iterative, deferred detection of equality).
4. But sometimes you have to improvise. And sometimes you want to.
   Oh shit we ran out of walnuts. Let’s just use pecans instead. Hey, what do you think would happen if we just added a little bit of coconut? Whoever thought of baking ricotta cheese into a cookie?
5. But the iterations are short enough that you can just keep doing it.
   Practice makes perfect, and that is what I tell myself and my family as I bake dozens and dozens of cookies. Because the barrier to entry for the creation of a program is pretty low, you can and are encourage to keep doing it and replicating that success! Also if you keep creating iterations you can get chubby from eating too many cookies or sitting too long and staring at your computer screen.
6. You can enjoy the fruits (or cookies) of your labor. And share them with your friends and family.
   Check out the delicious new macarons I made! Yes, I already ate half of them. Oh and you should also check out this new iOS app we just launched—it simplifies baked goods sharing, like a Lyft for cookies.
7. Or ask for advice on a “half-baked” (see what I did there) idea to work together to make it more exciting.
   Two heads are better than one when it comes to creating new ideas. And of course, good company is necessary for intellectual and philosophical conversation while mixing ingredients together to the Pandora Christmas station or pulling all nighters on an intense caffeine and coffee high at a hackathon.
8. You can always push yourself to try something more difficult.
   I started by baking cake mixes from the box (which according to my friends doesn’t really count as baking but hey—you gotta start somewhere) just as I started coding on Android AppInventor (the same argument could be made for this).
9. But in the end, you feel accomplished.

I’m glad I can (and have friends who) both bake and code. Here’s to the delicious and fun things we’ll create in the new year ☺