Dogfooding

Definition

Using your own product internally before inflicting it on customers, based on the phrase "eating your own dog food." If the developers won't use their own software, that tells you everything you need to know about the software.

Example Usage

"We're dogfooding the new release this week," announced the PM, and by Friday the entire engineering team had filed more bug reports than the previous quarter combined.

Related Terms

Advanced

iTart

A woman who gets inexplicably impressed by the latest tech gadgets, making her an easy target for guys who think flashing their new iPhone is a personality trait. It's equal parts dated, slightly sexist, and a relic from when people thought owning an iPad made you interesting. The male equivalent is just called 'every guy in a coffee shop with a MacBook.'

💻 Tech / IT

Intermediate

Technical Debt

The accumulated cost of all the shortcuts, quick fixes, and "we'll refactor it later" promises that pile up like credit card bills you keep meaning to pay. Every codebase has technical debt; the only question is whether yours requires minimum payments or full bankruptcy.

💻 Tech / IT

Intermediate

terraform

The ambitious (some might say hubristic) process of transforming another planet's atmosphere and environment to make it Earth-like and habitable for humans. It's planetary renovation on a cosmic scale, typically discussed by Mars enthusiasts who think centuries-long engineering projects are reasonable solutions to climate change. The ultimate real estate development project, assuming we ever figure out how to actually do it.

💻 Tech / IT

Intermediate

hydraulics

The engineering science of making liquids do heavy lifting, literally. This is why your car's brakes work and why construction equipment can lift objects that would make mere mortals weep. It's essentially the art of pressurizing fluids to create mechanical advantage, which sounds boring until you realize it's what makes monster trucks bounce.

💻 Tech / IT

Advanced

throughput

The amount of data, transactions, or work that flows through a system in a given time period—basically measuring how much stuff your system can churn through before collapsing. It's the metric that separates the systems that can handle Black Friday traffic from those that crumble under three simultaneous users. Higher throughput is always better, until you realize it's bottlenecked by that one database query you wrote in 2019.

💻 Tech / IT

Intermediate

Framework

A pre-built foundation for software development that saves you from reinventing the wheel, then buries you under 40,000 wheels you didn't ask for. Choosing a framework is like choosing a religion -- it comes with strong opinions, devoted followers, and holy wars.

💻 Tech / IT

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