Eat Your Own Dog Food
As staff, you should use the services you are providing. For example, if you provide a bouncer, you should use that bouncer every day for all your IRC chat. In other words, eat your own dog food.
Eating your own dog food has many benefits:
- You notice right away when your service is broken
- It shows you have confidence in your own services
- It's a great way to advertise
If you're not dogfooding, this may be a sign that your service is broken. Please go and fix it. If we don't use our own services, who else will?
Dogfooding Examples
In February 1980, Apple Computer announced "Effective Immediately!! No more typewriters are to be purchased... We believe the typewriter is obsolete. Let's prove it inside before we try and convince our customers." (Wikipedia)
Microsoft forced over 200 developers to use Windows NT daily to perform daily builds. It crashed often. They fixed it. (Wikipedia)
What happens when you don't dogfood?
In the mid-1990s, Microsoft's internal email system was built around Unix. What an embarassment for Microsoft. Everyone considered it proof that Unix is better than Windows.
If you run your own mail server, are you using GMail every day? It would be an embarassment for your team. It proves GMail is better than your own mail server.
- Thus, I came to the conclusion that the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. The separation of any of these four components would have hurt TeX significantly. If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.--Donald E. Knuth, "The Errors Of TeX"