Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

29 comments

  1. crazyscot

    Just in case I’ve incriminated myself :-), I’m answering in a work context, where I understand the term is a piece of jargon which some of my colleagues picked up from Microsoft contacts.

    Reply
    • neilh

      MS are certainly one of the bigger companies practicing it, though you can quite easily tell which projects they used it and which they didn’t.

      Reply
    • neilh

      The phrase comes from ‘to eat your own dogfood’, to use the things you make. We’ve recently been having a discussion about the value of it in producing better quality products – I wondered how widespread the practice is, and whether people thought it effective.

      Personally I think it is essential to creating good products, and wouldn’t hestitate to recommend it for nearly all technology development. Of course there are limits, it would be impractical for Boeing engineers to get a plane each. But for domestic, and even most corporate, electronic systems the benefit from understanding the use of what you are making considerably outweighs the cost of being provided with prototype hardware.

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        • neilh

          Wheres your sense of imagination?

          Though I presume you would be a receiver of bills, which, at some level at least, makes you a user of the system.

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      • slightlywinded

        The intellij Java IDE by JetBrains used to be a good example. Although IMHO they’ve now been using it and working on it for so long, it’s as though they’ve headed off on some strange developmental path in rather closed, self-referential / hermeneutic styleee, and produced something that you have to be the product’s own dev team to get full use out of…

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      • jarkman

        For us, it’s enormously useful. It would be hard to make decent stuff without it. It’s so obviously a good idea we scarcely talk about it.

        But we’re making software (easy to make, easy to change) with a small team (so everyone is a designer) for very non-specialist applications (easy to find everyday use cases for) for smartphones (ditto).

        If we were implementing fusion-bomb simulation algorithms with a team of thousands, I can see it might not be quite so straightforward. Just think of the use cases….

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        • neilh

          Roughly the same target market as where I am, though we’re probably aiming bigger (given who I’m working for at the moment). There seems little reason not to be using phones containing the software we’re making, they’re easily available in the market and we have links with the manufacturers anyways. Yet someone was arguing against dogfooding, I’m trying to understand why.

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          • jarkman

            I guess there may be danger (in a structured organisation) that all the dogfoodees start to have UI design input, and drive the designers potty.

          • neilh

            Actually the danger is a little different to that, since the UI itself is not something under our direct control. So it becomes an issue of intercorporate relationship management. Way outside the scope of what I know about.

          • neilh

            Lots of incoherent arguments, the closest I got to coherency was his manager describing him as ‘a tit’, which was quite restrained given some of the other names I’ve heard.

          • neilh

            Yeah, I started out thinking it was just me who thought that, but it seems I’m not alone.

            Still doesn’t mean management are going to do the right thing, which is a shame, since there is so much to be gained from getting things like that right.

            Me, I want to live and breathe software, its part of my life and I want to work with other people who feel like that. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it does it well…

  3. godgirl

    you should warn those of us with a more sensitive disposition not to try answering polls about work!

    *aieeee*

    *falls over*

    my brain! my brain!

    Reply

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