What Are You Missing As a Developer?

Posted on June 18, 2010

There is a well known verse in software engineering that says “eat your own dog’s food” or “dogfooding”. Meaning, use your own product you make. That’s true for developers and company itself no doubt. In my opinion, as a developer

  • if you don’t study, then you are missing something.
  • If you don’t try something new to learn then you are missing something.
  • if you don’t follow the current trend then you are missing something.
  • if you don’t share your ideas/thoughts with other developers then you are missing something.
  • if you don’t work with a better developers then you are missing something

BUT,

to me, you are missing MOST important thing IF you don’t communicate or stay in touch with general USERS who are mainly eating your product! I’m lucky enough to work on some exciting projects in my short career. Most of them had thousands of daily active users. I had chance to stay in touch with those users and communicate with them. Specially when i was in tripperlabs. But poor me, i was such a lazy ass who never took that chance seriously.

And,

I wouldn’t realize this truth until i worked on NoobFeed. I worked on this project for 3 months and i must say that was a great experience for me. I can assure you that it wasn’t my best work but it was one of the best experience in my career!

Why?

because this is such a project that opened my eyes different way and gave me the idea that interactions with the users is one of the most important things for a developer. I would read users feedback everyday, i would reply their queries everyday, i would share my own ideas [which wasn't the same as i would share with a developer] and all these interactions gave me such feelings that i never got from anywhere else before. They would criticize for any mistake and they would appreciate for any kind of good work! This is such an experience that made me thing how important it is for a developer to interact with the users. Because you will get a PURE idea by this about the real environment and you can imagine how your own product going to work in the market.

So what about you?

This entry was posted in Inspiration, Job Experience, Web and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.
  • Ron

    Spot on Junal. Unless you know how end users are reacting with your work, you can never improve you work. I'm happy to see that you took this opportunity to improve yourself and working closely with our users. Not to mention that you became the Dev hero already in NoobFeed. We have had many programmers worked on this project but none was as productive and successful as you are. And, it's a good thing that you've shared your sole secret ;)

  • Saif_shobus

    nice post indeed…….. like the quote 'doggfooding' :)

  • Pingback: ERNESTO

  • Mahmud Ahsan

    Nice article, Junal Vai.

  • saidur

    @junal bhai , you have shared a very important things .

  • http://junalontherun.com/ junal

    Thanks guys, i'm happy that you guys liked it

  • Pingback: JERRY