Zen and the Art of Making Samogon
What distillation taught me about systems design, patience, and the irreducible complexity of transformation.
My grandmother made samogon in the basement of our Barnaul apartment building, in a copper contraption that was technically illegal and practically inevitable. She had learned the process from her mother, who had learned it during a period when the Soviet state had opinions about home distillation that were vigorously enforced and universally ignored.
The apparatus was a system. I understood this only later, working in enterprise software architecture, when I recognized the same fundamental problems she had been solving with copper tubing and physics.
Transformation Requires Heat
The first principle of distillation: you cannot get the output without the input plus energy. Not inspiration-energy, not enthusiasm-energy. Actual, sustained, calibrated energy.
This seems obvious until you watch teams approach system migrations the way people approach starting a car on a cold morning — turn the key, wait, try again, and fundamentally disbelieve that the process has requirements.
My grandmother never turned the heat up faster to finish sooner. She understood that the separation of compounds happened at specific temperatures and not at other temperatures, and that the sequence mattered, and that impatience was not a variable you could optimize.
I have explained this to six different product managers in four different companies, always unsuccessfully.
The Foreshots Problem
The first liquid that comes out of the still is called foreshots. It contains methanol and other compounds that are not vodka. You discard it. The temptation to keep it — it’s liquid, it came from the process, it smells like the thing you want — is exactly the temptation that produces bad software in the first iteration.
Every system produces foreshots. The insight is not in the foreshots. The insight is that you have to produce them to get to what you actually want, and that no amount of prior planning will let you skip that step.
What Copper Taught Me
I inherited the still after my grandmother died. It sits in my São Paulo apartment in a city where samogon is called cachaça and is legal and the whole operation is different. I have not used it. But I think about it when I am designing data pipelines, when I am explaining to someone why we cannot simply move the data from one system to another without a transformation layer.
Transformation has a shape. You cannot reason your way around the shape. You can understand the shape better, and understanding it better is the whole of the art.