Year: 2015

Software Wine-Tasting

June 8, 2015 2:14 pm

In the software world there is a term, "dogfooding," (shortened from "eating your own dog food") which describes the act of a team / company using the very software they build--usually as a critical part of their daily work.

That is, if you're the GMail team and you want to produce the best GMail service you can, you want your software developers, designers, managers, etc. all using GMail on a daily basis.  This will expose them to rough edges that need to be improved and the raw exposure will hasten the work to fix issues.  It also serves to show confidence in the product.  You might be suspicious of the quality of GMail if you heard that all the people that work on the product use something else.

This is all well and good for the kind of software that your own team can use on a daily basis.  But what if your software isn't an email client, or an instant messenger, or a music player?  The software I spend my time building is not software that I have any reason to use.  The customers/users are a specialized group of people.

I was having a technical discussion today with a group of software developers on this subject.  We recognized that dogfooding our software didn't make any sense in our environment, but it did make sense to sit down with our users and observe how they use the software and what seems to be confusing or slowing them down.  I described this process as "wine-tasting."  We're not consuming the product, we merely sample it in small quantities to try and understand it better.

So there you have it: if you can't dogfood your software, you should at least by wine-tasting it.

Let's Go Fly a Kite

May 25, 2015 8:16 pm

IMG_20150525_175612a IMG_20150525_182028aIt was windy and cool today so we met up with some friends and went to the park for the evening.  We picked up some dinner on the way to eat at the park and then play.  This park is up on the side of a hill overlooking the valley near the municipal airport so we got to watch the vintage B-17 and B-24 bombers flying around (Part of the Wings of Freedom Tour).

We brought our turtle kite that we've only successfully flown once.  But, there was plenty of good steady wind today and we had no trouble getting it up in the air.  Heather thought it was amazing.

Enjoy some more pictures:

I'm a tortoise! And Fentons!

May 24, 2015 9:00 pm

A couple of weeks ago I was lamenting to Jess that we needed to _do_ something.  So on Friday the 15th she suggested I take the afternoon off from work and we go to the Oakland Zoo, so we did.  Heather had a blast, as she always does.  One of her favorite things to do is to hop across the "lily pads" in the kids area.  Which she did for like half an hour and made a friend with another little girl.  Then she lost her balance and stepped into the pond and soaked her shoe, sock, and pant leg.  Which is why she's only wearing one shoe in these pictures.

Her favorite thing to see was the zebras, but we also stopped to watch the lions, giraffes, camels, and elephants.  I had read somewhere that elephant sounds were used as the basis for the Tyrannosaurus Rex sounds in Jurassic park.  Well, while we were watching the elephants one of them made this low growling kind of noise which made me think of that tidbit because it was spot on.  It's apparently also true, a lot of other animals were used to (and usually heavily modified).

It was after the zebras that we headed for the children's area where Heather soaked her foot.  After that it was off to see the tortoises and lemurs.  Luckily, it was a cool day and the tortoises were lounging in their shelter with the heat lamps.  Luckily, I say, because at one point Heather took off running and climbed into the tortoise enclosure before I caught up with her (through one cable-fence and over a short wall; tortoises don't really need much to keep them in).  She only got one leg in before I grabbed her but she was ready to bolt.

After retrieving her we pretended to be tortoises:

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And then we rode on a (fake, obviously) tortoise.
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The zoo closes at 4 so we headed to as-seen-in-Up! Fentons for dinner and ice-cream:

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Fentons_UpThe movie makes it look like it's off by itself in the suburbs.  That's a lie.  The food was pretty good regardless, but a little pricey for what it was.

Heartbreaking

8:26 pm

Heather was acting rather unsettled at bedtime this evening.  We had finished story time and Jess and Corinne had left the room while I stayed with Heather for a few minutes while she got comfortable.

After only being in bed about a minute she got up and climbed down in to my lap and curled up against me (she basically never does this).  She told me she was tired but didn't want to go to sleep; she wanted to stay with me.  So I held her and snuggled her for about 10 minutes and then convinced her to try climbing in to bed again.

Instead of lying down and getting ready to fall asleep she started saying that she was hungry--really hungry.  I was skeptical as she had eaten quite a large dinner less than an hour earlier so I convinced her to try to fall asleep and I'd check on her in a few minutes.  When I tried to leave she pleaded with me to stay a few more minutes, so I did.  After a minute or two she fell asleep so I got up and went out to the family room.

After 15 minutes or so I can hear her in her room sobbing.  So I make my way to her room just as she's getting out of bed and I scoop her up and ask her what's wrong.  She tells me that she's, "Super hungry, really really really hungry."  So I agree to find her something to eat.  She agrees to eat some graham crackers and then says she's really cold.  So I bundle her up in a blanket on the couch with her graham crackers and sit with her while she barely nibbles on them.

I ask her if she's feeling alright and she says something like, "I feel sad."  And then she asks where Jess is.  I told her Jess was trying to get Corinne to sleep.  Then she broke my heart: "Why does Corinne get all the attention?  I know it's hard work getting Corinne to sleep, but I want to see Momma too."  Or something pretty close to that.

I told her we could wait until Jess came back out and have Jess take her back to bed when she was ready.  So we sat on the couch wrapped up in a blanket while she nibbled on graham crackers waiting to get some attention from Momma.  It was so sad.  Poor girl.