ExpanDrive

It’s no secret that some of the best software comes from companies that eat their own dog food. But some programs are easier to dog food than others. If you’re working on project management app or bug tracker, then it’s simple. Your own software is part of your workflow. You find a bug, you fix it in your own software.

On the other hand, if you write software for keeping track of dry cleaning, or managing taxi queues, then you probably don’t use your own software all that much. I mean, once every few days you’ll pretend that you’re using your software. You’ll go through the motions and make sure everything works, but that’s not the same as using it. That’s probably why dry cleaning and taxi software blows.

We’ve been eating dog food here at Magnetk since our beta version. Sometimes, when I’m working on the web site or or server-fu, I’ll spend the whole day working through ExpanDrive. But other times I’ll be working on local files in XCode or emacs, and I end up hardly using ExpanDrive at all.

That’s about to change. Today we each made an entry called localhost in our Drive Managers that connects right back to our own computer. Our goal is to do 100% of our development over ExpanDrive. We’re eating dog food at every meal.