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Easter feast and task pipelines (48)

A Greek Easter feast

As this post goes live, your host and author is most likely indulging in the joys of Easter Sunday. In Greece, where I come from, Easter is the biggest holiday of the year. And, as you might expect from a culture famous for its love of food, the Sunday feast is a central part of the celebration.

The meal varies by region and family tradition, but one thing remains constant: roasted lamb. It symbolizes the sacrifice of Jesus, and it's always the star of the table. If you're reading this on Easter Sunday, there’s a good chance I’m savoring some leftover lamb while you scroll through these lines.

Now, let me tell you—preparing this feast is no small feat. Roasting the lamb and getting the rest of the meal ready is a coordinated effort, usually involving many helping hands. To make sure everything is done in time for the classic Greek lunch hour (around 14:00), the tasks must be broken down and distributed efficiently.

This is where the real planning begins...

Lamb, logistics and deadlines

One key principle of good planning is to break large, complex tasks (like cooking a holiday meal) into smaller, manageable ones. For example: someone can be setting the table, another can shop for groceries, someone else can preheat the oven, and so on. This division of labor allows many people to work in parallel and speeds up the overall process. But here’s the catch: some tasks simply can’t be parallelized.

Here’s a truth we all learn eventually—no matter how many people you assign to a task, some things take time. As the old joke goes: Nine women can’t make a baby in one month. The same goes for roasting lamb. No matter how much help you have, the lamb still needs several hours to be roasted! (at least three, depending on the roasting method and size)

This is where task planning needs to respect natural bottlenecks. When you have a task with a hard time requirement like roasting, you plan everything else around it. The "unit of work" here is determined by the minimum time it takes for the bottleneck task to complete.

To make sure nobody is stuck waiting around, your plan should aim to keep everyone productive while respecting the constraints of the tasks that can’t be sped up.

Amdahl said it first

This brings us to Amdahl’s Law, a concept from computer science that applies perfectly here. Amdahl observed that the maximum speedup of a system using multiple processors is limited by the time needed for the sequential portion of the task. In simple terms: even if you parallelize everything else, your speed is ultimately constrained by the part you can’t parallelize.

In our Easter feast, the lamb is the sequential task. No matter how quickly you chop vegetables, set the table, or pour the wine, you’re still waiting on that lamb. The smartest strategy? Start the slowest task first, then layer the rest around it to keep the kitchen running like clockwork.

While this may sound like just a fun reflection on a family meal, it holds a deeper truth: all projects have their lamb. Whether you’re managing a software deployment, organizing an event, or leading a team, there will always be tasks that can't be sped up or split apart.

So next time you’re leading a project, think like you’re planning a feast: identify the lamb, respect the roast time, and get the team working on everything else in the meantime. And if you're reading this with a plate of leftovers nearby—kali oreksi!



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