Dogfooding

Dogfooding is a development philosophy where the team uses its own product in real work. The term originated at Microsoft in the 80s: "eating your own dog food."

Why it matters

A tester looks for bugs. A user lives with the product. The difference is enormous.

When a developer personally depends on their own tool, they feel every rough edge. Not in the abstract "users might find this inconvenient" sense, but concretely: "this annoys me every single day."

Bugs get found faster. Priorities fall into place naturally. Features that seemed important turn out to be unnecessary. And small details nobody thought about turn out to be critical.

How it works for us

This site is dogfooding in its purest form. We use trip2g to talk about trip2g.

Every documentation page, every blog post, every demo — a real-world test of the platform. Found a bug in templates? Because we ran into it ourselves. Added a feature? Because we wanted it ourselves.

The interactive map is one example of this approach. We were building a demo to show off capabilities, and ended up with a backlog full of bugs and ideas.

The flip side

Dogfooding doesn't replace feedback from real users. The team isn't typical users. They have different context, different habits, different tolerance for pain.

But as a starting point — it works great. First, make it comfortable enough for yourself. Then listen to others.

In practice

If you're building a tool — use it yourself. If it's a platform — build on it. If it's a service — be your own customer.

The inconveniences will stop being someone else's problem. They'll become yours.