Moonfooding
This went out yesterday as issue 12 of The Angelo Report, a weekly newsletter published every Sunday afternoon.
Earlier this week, I asked if folks had explicit moonlighting policies at work.
At Wave, our contracts explicitly allow us to have a side business, so long as a) it doesn't compete with Wave, and b) it doesn't distract you from your work. That's imminently reasonable, and also an exceptionally good idea.
Aside: I have this habit of joining companies after using their product. I was a FogBugz user before I joined Fog Creek as a support engineer; I was a Wave user before I joined their mobile platform team. I still work on the WriteFreely app, and use it to post to my Write.as blog — though I moved to Write.as after starting work on the app.
Anyways, there's a concept called dogfooding that suggests that product teams should use their products to see where the pain points and papercuts lie — ”eating one's own dog food” as a way to see if it's any good.
Aside, again: For the record, I have never eaten dog food. I've also never had a dog. I still don't think I would eat dog food if I did.
At Fog Creek, we used an internal build of FogBugz to run product engineering, customer support — heck, we even used it as an Applicant Tracking System for a while. It was deeply integrated into how we did things, and before a release, we'd test it on our build before releasing it to prod, and everyone was tasked with testing it out and making sure nothing broke. Edge cases sometimes got missed, of course, but this org-wide QA period helped us make sure FogBugz was up to our standards.
Wave is a bit different. We can't easily dogfood the product internally, as it's meant for microbusinesses — a handful of employees, not hundreds. But if a couple dozen of those hundreds have their own little microbusinesses, and they use Wave's software, then a moonlighting policy makes sense. It allows for dogfooding.
Or moonfooding.
Or doglighting? No, okay, moonfooding.
It's one of those weird situations where a policy that encourages your employees to work on stuff other than their job can help you build something better.
Around The Web
- It's amazing how you can live in a city for decades and still not know very much about it. This episode of The Life-Sized City focused on Montreal, and opened my eyes to programs that aim to make boroughs more walkable, cycleable, and green. I like my car, don't get me wrong, but a city that promotes walking and green spaces creates neighbourhoods, and those microcosms are sorely lacking today.
- I love notebooks and this history of Moleskine digs into how searching for a product to sell can come from the oddest of places. As an aside: my preference is for Leuchtturm1917 notebooks, A5, dotted grid. I can't really explain why.
- I have a bit of a thing for haberdashery, menswear, and grooming. I loved George Hahn's sharing of his first barber shave in London, and have added it to my bucket list. It's the little things, after all.
Thought Of The Week
Reactions are an interesting thing.
If I get outwardly frustrated in reaction to something, someone I care about who is involved with that thing might feel I'm frustrated with them.
On the flip side, if I'm outwardly calm in reaction to that thing, that same someone might feel that I don't care about the issue.
Over-communicating why you feel the way you do about stuff helps avoid that. In fact, it turns out that it's just the right amount of communicating.