“Organizations are set up to deal with biscuit tins. They're not set up to deal with biscuits.”
Maintainable · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Context
Stringer, who studied philosophy, on the gap between software and descriptions of software: the tin carries a nice picture and a description, and the biscuit is a different thing. Descriptions can be produced quickly and don't go stale; the software itself needs looking after, which he says still holds in the age of vibe coding.
Transcript
…book is about. So the first kind of however many chapters, I don't know, six or seven chapters are kind of like helpful, useful ways of seeing software development. And then there are four or five chapters about unhelpful and painful ways of looking at software development and project management.
Do you feel like you there's something about how you approach project management in the software development lifecycle that is very atypical and is maybe part of your secret sauce?
…the biscuit have any kind of connection with the biscuit? How can this thing that's a description of the biscuit, which when you think about what descriptions are, they're kind of patterns on a page or they're noises or they're kind of like some visual things. How can that have any connection with actual biscuits? And one of the things that I kind of I realized when I was writing my book is organizations are set up to deal with biscuit tins. They're not set up to deal with biscuits. And I had this kind of revelation. I was reading a book. I am not a mathematician, so I'm not entirely sure why I was reading this book. I was reading a book on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. And I wouldn't like to have to explain what Gödel's incompleteness theorem is. But one of the things they said in there was that numbers and descriptions of numbers exist on, they use the word substrate.…
problem with that to the top.
And so, kind of like the understanding, because most organizations just talk in descriptions, they don't talk in actual things. And so, one of the things I was saying earlier is you have to get the biscuits to the people who want to eat the biscuits. And then, once you've done that, then you can…
I'm digesting that, Mark. And I could go for a batch of biscuits right now as well. Some digestives in particular, like the chocolate ones. I'm like a really big fan of hobnobs. Let's take a moment for the teams running Ruby apps. If your test coverage says 90%, there's a decent chance it's lying…
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