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Always, always, dogfood what you produce. The number one way devs cease making products people care to use is by not using what they make.

deadmutex 2y ago
I think there should be a distinction here. E.g. if you work on a browser, possibly implementing parts of image loading, or javascript parser, etc. Are you consider a dogfooder if you use the browser? or do you need to lots of write Javascript yourself, etc. to be considered "a user of your product"? Typically, these are two different sets of people. So, I don't buy the "always, always" part
- wink 2y ago
  I suppose this problem is timeless, back when I was active in the PHP community it was a long-running joke that people who "graduated" to committing to the actual php source (in C) were not doing web development work anymore. And I suppose it was actually true for the majority. On the other hand, designing language features wasn't really related to using it for web work.
robertlagrant 2y ago
I'm a man who once made medical software for pregnant women. There's no point being dogmatic.
Ragnarork 2y ago
I'm sure all those devs working on fighter jet's software would love to but alas...
kllrnohj 2y ago
Dogfooding doesn't mean you know how to build it. Take for example the graphics engineers on Unreal Engine. They almost certainly know how to fly around test zones or make stress scenarios, but they aren't going to be building large, detailed, open world maps like will be seen in the next Cyberpunk or whatever. And it's not reasonable to expect that of them, either. Nor are the people doing UI work in Blender going to be able to make Big Bunny. Nor are the people working on fusion360's parametric system going to build complex mechanical-fluid simulation scenarios. Flutter is simpler than those, sure, but even in that world you have people that do nothing but fonts & text for their entire careers. They'll know how to do text stuff in flutter, but they'd be lost if you demanded they make a tiktok clone.

deadmutex 2y ago

I think there should be a distinction here. E.g. if you work on a browser, possibly implementing parts of image loading, or javascript parser, etc. Are you consider a dogfooder if you use the browser? or do you need to lots of write Javascript yourself, etc. to be considered "a user of your product"? Typically, these are two different sets of people. So, I don't buy the "always, always" part

wink 2y ago
I suppose this problem is timeless, back when I was active in the PHP community it was a long-running joke that people who "graduated" to committing to the actual php source (in C) were not doing web development work anymore. And I suppose it was actually true for the majority. On the other hand, designing language features wasn't really related to using it for web work.

robertlagrant 2y ago

I'm a man who once made medical software for pregnant women. There's no point being dogmatic.

Ragnarork 2y ago

I'm sure all those devs working on fighter jet's software would love to but alas...

kllrnohj 2y ago

Dogfooding doesn't mean you know how to build it. Take for example the graphics engineers on Unreal Engine. They almost certainly know how to fly around test zones or make stress scenarios, but they aren't going to be building large, detailed, open world maps like will be seen in the next Cyberpunk or whatever. And it's not reasonable to expect that of them, either. Nor are the people doing UI work in Blender going to be able to make Big Bunny. Nor are the people working on fusion360's parametric system going to build complex mechanical-fluid simulation scenarios. Flutter is simpler than those, sure, but even in that world you have people that do nothing but fonts & text for their entire careers. They'll know how to do text stuff in flutter, but they'd be lost if you demanded they make a tiktok clone.