To eat one's own dogfood is an expression used to describe the process of using internally the products that are normally sold to customers. At VMware we periodically hold dogfood days for specific products or features before dispatching them to our external beta testers.
Yesterday we held one for the feature that I've been working on for the past year or so. We set up a dogfood lab with a few machines running either Ubuntu Linux 6.06 or Windows XP Pro configured for using the feature and had a batch of VMs available locally on each system for getting broad coverage of the guest platforms we suspect will be popular. Some people from around the various Palo Alto buildings came in and spent a few hours playing with the software while others followed our online instructions to test the feature out on their own desktops. They were each supposed to record a journal of their experiences and thoughts as they used the software and hand those to us at the end.
We got quite a bit of useful and enlightening feedback for improving the feature, some of which I'd been wondering about myself and some of which had escaped me entirely. We'll probably hold another dogfood day for all of Workstation 6.0 in the near future and include this feature as part of that once I've had a chance to address some of the issues that were raised this time.
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energeticInspired by a conversation I had with a co-worker at hammarskjold, I used a rather creative idea for my Halloween costume this year: a pair of sheets of stiff green paper with my head sandwiched between then and a hole cut out of one, through which my face could stick out; on each side, respectively, was sketched the likeness of a US $100 bill. Yes, I dressed up as Ben Franklin.
My neighbour Eliza and her friend Seth helped me construct the headgear and, since it didn't seem prudent to bike with that contraption atop me noggin', drove me to the Halloween party thrown last night by my friends in Mountain View. Most people uninsightfully assumed I was dressed up as money but a scant few realized whom I was supposed to be.
Unfortunately, the size of my headgear soon made it impractical to be worn in a crowded room so I had to retire it and was left wearing one of my Google t-shirts. At one point somebody assumed that comprised my costume for the night:
"you know, that's only a good costume if you don't actually work for Google."
"I don't."
"Nice! Although I guess that if you did then you'd still be at work."
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