Snacking on Dogfood

Joel says that he uses his software to write the Joel on Software site. But he never changes the features or layout of the site. The last thing he has done is add the extra languages. Is this really "eating" or just "snacking". What I mean by "snacking" is just doing enough to get done what you used to get done in previous versions.

I have tried to do things with CityDesk that it is just incapable of doing. For example, I had my homepage with an index article that does the usual of looping through the articles in my Blog/Articles directory and lists them. But one of the articles I wrote also had a loop that iterated through a sub-directory of my blogs. <BOOM>. Its fine, I just replaced with static links. But at the time I thought "hey, I can't believe they didn't hit this during testing, or on Joel On Software".

No Name
Friday, April 16, 2004

To be fair, you can only expect someone to use a tool in a way  that's useful to them even if they are "dogfooding". 

a cynic writes...
Friday, April 16, 2004

[nod] Dogfooding is about finding the stupid little errors that drive users insane. Your bug is a testing bug, and I'll wager the Fog Creek team is putting a circular reference checker on the list as we speak.

Dogfooding brings up things like dialog boxes that seem like a good idea during testing and development, but the 25th time you cancel out of it you think "that damn box needs a 'don't show this again' checkbox"

Philo

Philo
Friday, April 16, 2004

And don't forget, there's a difference between knowing about a weakness or missing feature and actually implementing it. We have literally thousands of feature requests for CityDesk in our database, including a frequent feature request that you should be able to loop on folders. Unfortunately we only have finite resources so the hard part is selecting the right things to work on at any given time.

(By the way, in the meantime, the workaround is to create an article with the same name in every folder and loop on those).

Yes we know about it, yes we want to fix it, ut believe me we've heard it a thousand times from customers, and as soon as someone has time it will get done.

Joel Spolsky
Fog Creek Software
Friday, April 16, 2004

when will we see http://citydesk.sourceforge.net?

RP
Friday, April 16, 2004

You are asking Joel to open source the product.

Why should he do that?

Why should he stop selling it?

Because if he open sources the product, bye-bye sales!

John
Friday, April 16, 2004

We might more likely see http://citydeskclone.sourceforge.net

...
Friday, April 16, 2004

>> as soon as someone has time it will get done.

Well maybe somebody should be spending more time working and less time tending to JoS, hmm?

Anon-y-mous Cow-ard
Friday, April 16, 2004

Yeah! Fire the marketing staff to save money until sales improve!

Philo

Philo
Friday, April 16, 2004

LOL or more like http://halffinishedcitydeskclonewithpoorUI.sourceforge.net

Dan Maas
Friday, April 16, 2004

You mean

http://halffinishedcitydeskclonewithpoorUIdevelopedeintrelyinPHP.sourceforge.net

www.MarkTAW.com
Friday, April 16, 2004

You mean :

PHPFrameworkToCreateCityDeskClones.sourceforge.net

Damian
Saturday, April 17, 2004

or Postnuke.com ?

dir at badblue com
Saturday, April 17, 2004

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