Chomping the dog food with a nice Chardonnay

Joel Spolsky has written an interesting piece about the idea of “eating your own dogfood” which simply means using your own software - people who buy dogfood don’t eat it. Over the years, I have seldom been in the position to use the software that Thycotic Software Ltd has developed. The software has usually been out of my realm of usefulness - how many of us even know the slightest thing aboutchromatography, sewer planningor asbestos claims for that matter?

This all changed when Thycotic decided toproductize its internal time tracking and billing system -myclockwatcher.com was born! We use the systemeveryday as our time tracking system (to track billable consulting hours and product development hours) andnowitis also a product for our customers.

Some observationsto date:

There is furtherdiscussion on “eating your own dogfood” here.

March 30, 2005 | Filed Under .NET, Software Development

 

Comments

2 Responses to “Chomping the dog food with a nice Chardonnay”

  1. Marc Hoeppner on March 30th, 2005 1:21 pm

    Hmmm, this looks suspicously like the ASP.NET starter kit (http://www.asp.net/Default.aspx?tabindex=8&tabid=47) for time tracking!?

  2. Jonathan Cogley on March 30th, 2005 5:07 pm

    Marc,

    Yes - our product started with the Starter Kit but has been improved in many significant ways:

    1. myclockwatcher.com actually works! :-)
    2. Tons of bug fixes

    3. Unit tests - application is now Test Driven

    4. Time entry via email for handheld devices

    5. Expenses

    6. Clients

    7. Extensive reporting in html and pdf

    8. Keystroke optimized

    9. Added concept of billable and non-billable

    10. Vastly improved user interface

    And were are only just approaching our 1.0 release! Expect even more features in the future.

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