Simple question that I ask because I'm curious. What do you use to try to explain technical ideas to non-technical people? Mine is most commonly a car analogy - not that I know much about cars, but a certain level of innate knowledge about them is in the public conciousness.<p>So what do you normally use?
Cars, sex and music, depending on the audience.<p>After that, I explain the idea.<p>Edit: (to clarify) Cars, like you said, because a certain amount of car knowledge is already in the popular mob-brain. It's fairly easy to describe your web server, load balancer and scripting language as either car or engine parts.<p>Sex is useful when describing 3rd party API interfaces, particularly Facebook. This one can get pretty damn funny when the API is either poorly designed or unreliable. Also if you need to do weird things to make it work.<p>Music is good for the high-level stuff. Associating the front-end with the vocals, business tier with the guitars, database with the (wait for it) bass, and the server as the drums. There are bands with two or more of any of those roles (and keyboardists, and cow bell hitters, etc.), so this analogy tends to hold up very well as long as you avoid the details.
Cooking. That food should be delicious and not just edible (usability and UX). Coders and designers are chefs, each has their unique recipes but they all follow established best practices.
Cooking and a kitchen. I use a kitchen to explain the inner workings of a computer - RAM is counter-space, storage is a pantry/cabinets, the CPU is the person doing the cooking.
Fast Food Chain (for pre-packaged code) vs. Five Star Restaurants (for custom code)
-- Credit: This idea came from a Joel Spolsky book that I read a some time ago...