Michael Chu started Cooking For Engineers in June 2004 to store and share the recipes that he likes to use. Michael has a Bachelor of Science from the College of Engineering at University of California, Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Visit the site here.

How does your website differ from other cooking websites?

Cooking For Engineers approaches food and cooking information in a different way than the rest of the recipe or foodie sites on the Internet. One of the goals of the site is to provide as much relevant information as possible to the reader about a particular subject. For example, the recipes include photographs of the ingredients and individual steps to help guide the reader as well as discussion on why certain steps are taken and what happens if they are omitted or done improperly. Each step of the recipe is tested before writing the article and ingredients are provided in both U.S. and metric measurements. All this is then summarized in a succinct table for quick reference when the reader actually attempts to prepare the recipe. Why so much trouble? Because, I find that when trying to communicate to others how to cook, it's best to provide them with all the information they need to succeed before they start preparations in the kitchen. Additional information also helps the aspiring cook to understand what's happening when they cook and this makes it more likely that they will succeed when they start experimenting with new flavors and techniques.

How much time do you put into the website? Is it, or will it ever be, a full time concern?

I currently put in about 10-15 hours a week on the website. I'd love for it to grow to the point where I can work on it full time, but financial concerns will probably prevent this for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, I will continue working full-time as a software engineer for Fanpop and writing for Cooking For Engineers in my free time. I'm also looking into expanding the website's content with articles written by guest writers. If people are interested in writing for Cooking For Engineers, they can contact me at michael@cookingforengineers.com.

Describe its development and the technology that makes it work.

Cooking For Engineers started as a site where I could simply document my recipes and notes that I had taken over time. In fact, I didn't start with any intention of producing a cooking site - I simply wanted to try out the newly relaunched Blogger. I signed up for an account, uploaded a few pictures and wrote up a recipe for Salsa Cruda. I then wrote up a few more recipes and general articles on for - mainly for my own amusement and records. Within a couple months, I had enough readers that I wanted to expand past the Blogger engine and utilize features that didn't exist in Blogger (like a master table of contents). This resulted in the authoring of the content management system that Cooking For Engineers now runs on. The code was slowly added on piece by piece and continues to be worked on every once in a while as the websites needs change over time.