What Chocolatiering Taught Me About Software Engineering

I don't think that completely does it justice.

The discovery of a new technique (reheating the shells) made it possible to partition the shell making and filling from the sealing.

This is a good thing to think about if you want to make something a habit, or you simply wanna do it more often. I picked up some hobbies that I hadn't been doing very often since I started working by writing some glue code and setting up some programs so that when I want to do the thing, everything's already set up for me to start, and I don't have to dedicate any mental capacity to searching for the things I need and so on.

For an example more related to programming: in my last gig at work I had to develop some react components for this massive project, and there was a folder containing hundreds of components that had to have a specific file structure (one file for the component, one for the tests, one for the types, one for the SCSS styles, one for the storybook), so to create a new component there was a lot of boilerplate you had to write every time.

You could see that this was influencing the internal design of the components: people tended to prefer writing massive components that handled lots of state and displayed lots of things at once instead of breaking everything up into smaller, more manageable components.

Just writing a script that set up all that boilerplate automatically improved both the workflow of the developers and the design of the code, because people were more likely to create a smaller separate component when working on a feature rather than lumping everything into one monolithic component.