Eating Dog Food

Eating your own dogfood is a clever term used within the software industry to describe the process of using the software you're developing to help develop the software itself. For example, once Microsoft gets the next version of Windows to the point where it's basically usable, but not really finished, they start using the unfinished product internally. This provides a ready made group of testers to put the product through its paces.

In addition to being a testing milestone, the point at which you're ready to eat your own dog food is also very exciting point for the development team. It is the first time when the team has produced something that actually resembles the finished product.

I can't describe the width of the grin on my face last night when I realized that I was at that point. After weeks of looking at code and dummy test data, I'd finally built a product that I could start to use to GTD!

Of course, the site that I'm looking at on my development system probably won't even resemble the finished product, but I do have a working inbox. From this point on, I'm going to start capturing everything that I need to do within my development process in this inbox. Sure, I don't have areas for the rest of the GTD Flow Chart yet, but, hey, I've gotta start somewhere.