Dogfood, Nom Nom Nom
Dog food, the common noun, is reasonably self explanatory (pro tip: it's food for dogs). Dogfood the verb or dogfooding the verbal noun, though, might require a little bit of explanation.
At the root of it is this: if you make dog food, you should feed it to your own dogs. There are essentially two reasons for this:
- If you don't personally test it, how will know if it's any good?
- If your dogs don't eat it, why the hell should anyone else's?
The same principle applies to software.
Even more so in fact, as it's something you're more able to test directly. As a simple example: in Google, we use Google docs for most documentation purposes (design docs, presentations, etc.). I'm willing to bet that folks at Apple use iWork for much the same purpose. I'm absolutely certain that Microsoft employes use Office, excepting those times when it's necessary to write a document in the blood of a green eyed virgin upon the pressed skin of an albino goat.
This process is called dogfooding. You use the software internally before it's released to users, ensuring that it gets a lot more test usage. As an added bonus, developers who actually use the software they create are more likely to create software that's actually worth using. That's not always the case, of course, since most developers don't really fall into the "average users" category. Case in point: upgrading my computer to Lion broke my installation of Steam. I fixed it with a quick command line incantation, then performed a couple more in order to make The Stanley Parable functional under OSX. Most computer users would not be comfortable doing something like this, nor should they have to.
As well as using your company's products at work, it's generally a good idea to use them at home. It's always good to have a feel for what your company actually does and get more experience with it. I've used Google search more or less exclusively for at least ten years. That's not really a hard choice. It gives the best results. Likewise, I started using Google Chrome is my main web browser pretty much as soon as it was available for the platforms I used (in my last job that was actually Windows, OSX and Linux). I use iPhone in preference to Android, however, though I do have an upgrade due me towards the end of the year and it's not completely inconceivable that I might switch. For the time being at least, I'm definitely sticking with Wordpress, so I won't get to play with Blogger, Google Analytics or AdSense, either.
As well as dogfooding Google products at work, we also dogfood technologies and platforms. This sounds fairly obvious, but it's not always the case with companies who create platform technology. Microsoft, for instance, used to be famous for not using the technologies they provided to developers internally, though they are getting better now. Some of Google's technologies are open source, and thus available for everyone to use. Guice and Protocol Buffers are pretty good examples of this. Guice is amazing, by the way. This being the case, there's nothing to stop me using them on personal projects, should that be appropriate. Personal projects such as Clockwork Aphid, for example.
I'll talk about which particular Google technologies I think might be useful in later blog posts, but since I brought it up, I suppose I should probably say something about Clockwork Aphid. I've blown the dust off the code, tweaked a couple of things and got a feature I'd left half finished back on track. I tried switching my current implementation from jMonkeyEngine version 2 to version 3, only to find that while it does appear a lot faster and improved in several other ways, the documentation is pretty crappy, and it's less… functional.
I'll talk about that more later, but for now just know that things are once again happening.