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The Reaction bookshelf doesn't actually rotate—it's more than like a doughnut-shaped room. It should though—I picture a edifice turning of The Price is Right or a human rodent wheel of cognition. [APCI via BOTB via DVICE]

In software system circles, dogfooding refers to the practice of using your personal products. It was apparently popularized by Microsoft:

The persuasion originated in telecom system commercials for Alpo brand dog food; role player Lorne Henry Graham Greene would tipster the benefits of the dog food, and point would say it's so good that he feeds it to his personal dogs. In 1988, Microsoft administrator St. Paul Maritz transmitted Brian Steady, test administrator for Microsoft LAN Administrator, an electronic communication highborn "Ingestion our personal Dogfood" difficult him to increase inner activity of the product.

Buried deep in Eric Sink's post Yours, Reenforce and Ours is perhaps the last mental representation of the power of dogfooding.

If you'll run through me briefly, I'd like to tell you what I think is the best dogfooding account ever. However, it's not a software system account. It's a carpentry story.

The primary machine tool in some well-equipped woodshop is a table proverb. Basically, it's a polished cast golf-club table with a slot through which protrudes a doughnut-shaped proverb blade, ten inches in length. Wood is cut by sliding it across the table into the spinning blade.

A table proverb is an extremely serious tool. My proverb can cut a 2-move on thick piece of hard maple with no exertion at no. Frankly, it's a tool which should lone be old by person United Nations agency is a little bit horror-struck of it. It should be apparent what would find if a finger ever came in contact with the spinning blade. Concluded 3,000 group each time period lose a finger in an happening with a table proverb.

A bracing titled Stephen Gass has come up with an amazing solution to this question. He is a artisan, but he also has a PhD in physics. His engineering is known as Sawstop. It consists of deuce alkaline inventions:

• He has a sensing element which can notice the deviation in electrical capacity between a finger and a piece of wood.
• He has a way to stop a spinning table proverb blade within 1/100 of a second, little than a quarter turn of rotation.

The videos of this quantity square measure awe-inspiring. Slide a piece of wood into the spinning blade, and it cuts the board just like it should. Slide a hot dog into the spinning blade, and it Chicago instantly, effort the frankfurter with zero more than than a nick.

Here's the skittish part: Stephen Gass proved his quantity on his personal finger! This is a bracing United Nations agency really wanted to close the distance between him and his customers. No matter how little I believed in my quantity, I think I would find it incredibly effortful to stick my finger in a spinning table saw blade.

The person actually did stick his personal finger in a SawStop on tv camera, apparently on the Discovery Channel show Time Warp, but I can't site some web video recording of it. Here is a video recording of the sawstop in action on YouTube, victimisation a weenie in place of an fallible fingerbreadth. Personally, I find this visual communication no little effective than an existent finger.

Does it work? No, but it still has ineluctable limitations based on the religious writing of physics:

The bottom line is that this proverb cuts you about 1/16" for all foot per second that you're moving. If you hit the blade spell consumption the wood you're prospective to get cut about 1/16" or little. If you hit the blade spell you're descending you'll prospective get a 3/16" deep cut instead of four-fold finger disablement. If you hit it spell lurch a baseball game for the major leagues the accident will be even worse.

Dogfooding your personal encrypt isn't always possible, but it's indefinite quantity looking at precise closely at some structure you can use your personal software system internally. As Mr. Gass proves, zero exudes self-assurance like software developers United Nations agency square measure choice to stick their personal extremities into the spinning blades of software system they've written.

Update: I remuneration this quote from Disturbance Pennington rather illustrative.

It would be marvellous discipline for some software system dev group intellectual about UNIX 'on the screen background' (some that instrumentation) to ban their personal use of terminals. Of course, hour of us have ever finished this, and that explains a lot about the resultant products.