3 ms·

Also known as 'dogfooding' or 'eating your own dog food' [0], and yes, not enough companies/software teams do this. Developers that build software aimed at or n

by gregmac 10y ago

Also known as 'dogfooding' or 'eating your own dog food' [0], and yes, not enough companies/software teams do this. Developers that build software aimed at or naturally used by other software developers kind of have an unfair advantage here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

freehunter 10y ago
The company I work for, and specifically the product I support, came out with modular "apps" that can be installed to enhance the functionality. This came out about a year ago, and while the number of apps is pretty impressive for the niche market the product falls into, none of the apps were terribly useful or complicated. There wasn't a huge incentive to actually care about the app market, let alone download and use any of them. So leadership made the decision to dogfood our own app environment. Any new features that are not part of the core experience or modifications to existing features are now apps. And guess what? We found some limitations to our app infrastructure, corrected them, and now we have a (again, relative) ton of high quality apps. Turns out no one was making apps because the experience sucked, until the developers found that out first hand and course-corrected.
walshemj 10y ago
Back when I worked for a pre internet messaging company our terminals speed was slowed down to the same (1200 or 2400 baud) as a dial up user would see.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  There was a story last year about Facebook having "2G Tuesdays" to give employees an idea of what life on a slow network is like. I wonder whether it caught on?
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    Such a genius idea. I see far too many web applications not caring about latency. Forcing a developer to experience the same pain should help them. Unless that simply becomes the day everyone typically takes off, blames productivity on slow network connectivity, etc.
    - nostrademons 10y ago
      Google had a latency proxy on the corp network that you could use to simulate dialup, 2G, DSL, etc (along with unreliable connections). It was a great tool, and you could learn a lot by doing all your normal searches through the latency proxy. Alas, not many developers knew about it, and even fewer were willing to take the convenience hit to use it as part of their normal experience.
      - thedufer 10y ago
        OS X used to have a "Network Link Conditioner" that shipped with XCode, I believe. It did a lot of the things you're suggesting, but right at the network interface level. Unfortunately, it broke with the advent of Mavericks. No idea whether it works now, or even still exists. On the last web-app project I worked on, we had a middleware that activated automatically in dev mode and just inserted a delay in every request to bring a local delay up to our users' median delay. It was intentionally a bit of a pain to turn off, so almost everyone ran in that mode.
        ptomato 10y ago
        Still exists. https://developer.apple.com/download/more/?q=Hardware%20IO%20Tools https://developer.apple.com/download/more/?q=Hardware%20IO%2... is the link you're looking for.
      - phonon 10y ago
        There is one built into Chrome now. https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/profile/network-performance/network-conditions?hl=en https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/prof...

by gregmac 10y ago

freehunter 10y ago

The company I work for, and specifically the product I support, came out with modular "apps" that can be installed to enhance the functionality. This came out about a year ago, and while the number of apps is pretty impressive for the niche market the product falls into, none of the apps were terribly useful or complicated. There wasn't a huge incentive to actually care about the app market, let alone download and use any of them. So leadership made the decision to dogfood our own app environment. Any new features that are not part of the core experience or modifications to existing features are now apps. And guess what? We found some limitations to our app infrastructure, corrected them, and now we have a (again, relative) ton of high quality apps. Turns out no one was making apps because the experience sucked, until the developers found that out first hand and course-corrected.

walshemj 10y ago

Back when I worked for a pre internet messaging company our terminals speed was slowed down to the same (1200 or 2400 baud) as a dial up user would see.

dasmoth 10y ago
There was a story last year about Facebook having "2G Tuesdays" to give employees an idea of what life on a slow network is like. I wonder whether it caught on?
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Such a genius idea. I see far too many web applications not caring about latency. Forcing a developer to experience the same pain should help them. Unless that simply becomes the day everyone typically takes off, blames productivity on slow network connectivity, etc.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    Google had a latency proxy on the corp network that you could use to simulate dialup, 2G, DSL, etc (along with unreliable connections). It was a great tool, and you could learn a lot by doing all your normal searches through the latency proxy. Alas, not many developers knew about it, and even fewer were willing to take the convenience hit to use it as part of their normal experience.
    - thedufer 10y ago
      OS X used to have a "Network Link Conditioner" that shipped with XCode, I believe. It did a lot of the things you're suggesting, but right at the network interface level. Unfortunately, it broke with the advent of Mavericks. No idea whether it works now, or even still exists. On the last web-app project I worked on, we had a middleware that activated automatically in dev mode and just inserted a delay in every request to bring a local delay up to our users' median delay. It was intentionally a bit of a pain to turn off, so almost everyone ran in that mode.
      - ptomato 10y ago
        Still exists. https://developer.apple.com/download/more/?q=Hardware%20IO%20Tools https://developer.apple.com/download/more/?q=Hardware%20IO%2... is the link you're looking for.
    - phonon 10y ago
      There is one built into Chrome now. https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/profile/network-performance/network-conditions?hl=en https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/prof...