Tomato and Egg and Urbien

Yuan Yuan is off to Hangzhou for the next 10 days, on two back-to-back tours. Daddy's all alone at home putting the bread on the table, where it's currently growing mold. Tradition. Can't live with it, can't get moldy bread without it.

My roommate, a guy who works in finance, was asking me today what kind of stuff I work on. After completely confusing him with specifics he couldn't possibly understand without a basic background in Web technologies, I resorted to my best friend, the analogy. The analogy is a great device for when you've lost that caring feeling, when more important than "do they understand you" is "do they think you're working on some complicated shit." I'm a seasoned veteran of terrible analogies, and so I hit him right in the face with a tomato an egg parable. Try to imagine the following in Mandarin Chinese, the language it was first heard in.

Once there was a farmer, who loved to eat tomato and egg. How he came to love it is one of those mysteries of science. Perhaps his wife told him he better love it or else. Perhaps he had once been kidnapped by a tomato and egg chef and it's a permanent side-effect of the severe case of Stockholm syndrome he took away from that experience. Perhaps it was some kind of genetic predisposition that trickled down into his genes from the future. The past isn't the only force in genetics, as science fiction tells us.

In any case, this farmer loved tomato and egg more than anything in the world. But he had no freaking clue where tomatoes came from. He opened his prehistoric refrigerator over and over but they didn't appear to grow there. He looked out into the forest and didn't see any tomatoes swinging from trees. Even more baffling was the egg. How the hell did it get into that shell? And if it could do something like that, what else could it do? The people who hunted those must be very brave, he thought.

But then along came JQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch, and suddenly people could build web apps that actually had a chance against native apps. Really? No, not really. Ninjas could build those kind of apps, armed with Backbones and Zapiers and other magical gadgets whose names only six fingered people could spell correctly. Ninjas knew what to do when the JQuery Mobile page they swung to knock the banana off the tree worked liked a charm when swung to the left, but denatured the instant you swung it to the left. Ninjas could build steaks out of salads. The rest of us were still chopping down cells in the Excel forest, because everyone knows tomatoes have a non-zero chance of being found inside the trunk of a tomato tree cell. And the tomato tree, sneaky tree that it is, looks like any other tree!

All was lost. But all was not lost! Along came Urbien and they brought a tomato gun and an egg cannon with them, not to mention Jesus, who would multiply the ammunition whenever they were in danger of running out. All that was left for the non-ninjas to do was to design the models for their apps, to use their "domain expertise" (oops, 4 billion non-ninjas just fainted dead away) and write the recipe for tomato and egg. Suddenly entire armies of klutzes were leveling up and becoming ninjas just by waking up in the morning. Fine, the afternoon. For the sake of realism.

The moral of the story is that everything is relative. You may be an idiot, but tomorrow, when being an idiot is all you need to be to be able to paint the Sistine Chapel, you're no longer an idiot. You're eating a delicious plate of tomato and egg.

Of course the story I told my roommate was a little more embellished. I couldn't risk him understanding it all in one session. What would I have to say to him next time?