See, as nice as the concept of eating your own dogfood is, it really only works in certain situations.
If you write bespoke apps for insurance companies, as you’re not an insurance saleman you as a software developer can never really use it.
If you write hospital apps for hospitals, as you’re not a doctor you can never really use it.
If you write… well, if you write anything specialised then you can’t. Because your not a doctor, or a lawyer, or a insurance saleman, or a teacher, or a nuclear physicist.
The only place this really works if you’re writing generic apps everyone uses (word processing, time sheeting systems etc) or if you’re actually writing software for other programmers.
Actually using something you’ve built even for a few hours or days instead of just making sure the buttons work will reveal a completely different set of issues.
To add to the SawStop debate: I’m a member of The Sawdust Shop, which is sort of the woodshop equivalent of a gym – they have a large room with lots of equipment, and for a reasonable monthly fee I can go use it.
They’ve got SawStop table saws. In that environment, I expect it’s worth the extra cost for liability reasons (even though they have us all sign waivers), or at least for the fact that they’d really like to avoid having someone get seriously hurt there for PR reasons. It’s a bit different than a home situation, and the saws get used quite a lot more.
Anyhow, we were told at orientation that it’s a bit over $100 to fix the damage that comes from setting off the stop. You have to replace the saw blade and the stop. (That’s probably higher than the $50 number someone else quoted because, being a high-use shop, they use more expensive blades.)
As for MTBF of the signal processor – it does have at least some amount of self-test in the boot-up process (yes, the saw has a boot-up time), and I would expect that to catch many of the possible failures.
I’m glad it’s there, but I certainly don’t treat the table saw with any less respect because of it. (I did get caught, the other day, by doing something only a little bit stupid, and had a nasty gouge on my finger from the piece of wood that got yanked out of my hand and thrown at me. The SawStop doesn’t make the saw safe; it just eliminates one particular failure mode.)
There is an even more shocking dogfood tale that I have :
There was a great romanian architect called Anghel Saligny who built one of the greatest bridges in Europe at that time 1895.
He guaranteed the bridge’s safety by putting himself, his wife and children under the bridge before the very first train ever to pass it. The train passed and the bridge stood.
How many of us would have the guts to do the same for the piece(s) of software that we write? I wouldn’t.
The cabinet shop I work at has two Sawstops. They’ve had them for a couple of years now, but so far no one has fired it off due to touching it (thankfully).
It has gone off many times when guys forget that the material they are cutting has a metallic coating or is a hardwood with a high oil content. We also use a product that is covered in carbon fiber that sets it off too. And if you set the blade all the way down it can touch the aluminum stop block and set it off.
There is a light on the power switch that tells you if it senses a short so you can take care of it (it won’t let you turn it on if it’s already shorted). It does destroy the blade, but blades are cheap.
I don’t use them much, but I think they are a good idea, however we still need the Powermatic for the material that they can’t cut (the Sawstops have an override for this, but we are not allowed to use it) and a slider for the big stuff.
And I would defiantly not be willing to test one with my finger. I like my fingers just as they are : )
Not sure if this has been noted yet, didn’t have time to read all of the comments.
There is an override switch you can enable with a key that will turn it into a regular finger-slicing table saw. This way, if you were cutting really wet wood or something, you could just flip that on and be extra careful.
Another neat feature is the saw wont start if you have your hand on it.
An electrician told me once that American 110V home wiring causes hundreds of times more accidents each year than the 220V wiring in most European countries. The original reasoning was that 110V was just enough to not kill the average person if they touched it. The result is that people are willing to play with live wires, because they’ve been shocked a few times and think they can handle it.
220V, or 440V on the other hand, is likely to kill you immediately. Therefore, anyone working with it is far, far more likely to make extra doubly certain that the power is turned off, flagged, taped, and coned before doing work on home electrical wiring…
This is probably the only example I can think of where safety regulated through fear is a good thing.
There was a joke that went along with this story:
What’s the difference between 110V and 220V?
About 6 feet.
To the best of my knowledge, some serious dogfooding took place around the invention of the elevator break, by Elisha Otis. he had his assistance cut the cable holding the elevator while he (Otis) was inside it.
Not much of a cut, but the pad of one of my index fingers was completely shredded. I bled like a stuck pig with a head wound.
It’s unnecessary. Safely used, my table saw has not hurt me.
Of course it didn’t hurt you till you made a mistake. That’s what product safety is about. What did you think, it was about making sure that your stuff doesn’t injure you WHEN YOU USE IT CORRECTLY? The idea is to minimise injury when you DON’T.
I work in software now, but 28 years I worked in quality control in pharma company. One of the products I was responsible for was for elipsy. I found out after about a year, my grandmother was epileptic and used that product. One other product was contraceptive pill, same product the doctor prescribed for my wife.
At JavaOne last year (I think?) some people were doing a demo at the closing session with an industrial robot running realtime Java doing that game when you stab a knife quickly between fingers, only it was a glove laying there. They said they wanted to do a demo with a real hand and had done it before in private, but the lawyers wouldn’t allow them to do it on stage…
I also have an acquaintance who lacks half a finger. He worked in industry when he was younger and told his subordinates they had to put a cover in front of a spinning metal fan because it was dangerous. They asked which one he meant.
That one you idiots! (Points behind him). Snick
He put in on a plate with salad and took a picture of it, then put up the picture in the shop with a Don’t let this happen to you, always take safety seriously sign beneath.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel dogfooded part of the Clifton suspension bridge. He had an interesting problem - how to string the first support cable across the 250ft deep ravine. Obviously once the first one was in place he could use that one to support the second, and so on and so forth until the sections of the roadbed could be hoisted up. And there was no question of building a really high scaffolding tower; he couldn’t stop the ships.
So, he came up with a solution - a long steel rail bolted together on one side, counterweighted, and extended as a cantilever far enough for a rope to snag it from the far side, on which a sort of trolley would run, suspending a cradle.
They installed it all right, but there was some concern about whether any of the workers would be confident enough in it to use it. So Brunel went out on it first…somehow got stuck half way across and had to climb out of it to fix the bug. There’s a pub in Bristol called the Reckless Engineer as a direct result.
How many of us would have the guts to do the same for the
piece(s) of software that we write? I wouldn’t.
I think you would, if you put the analogy in the right perspective. Imagine you wrote an email-client, i bet, after you declare it stable, you would use it yourself, and after a time, even to send important documents.
Question. What if sticking your extremities into your software is forbidden by the laws of the state in which you code? Is it safe and legal to transport your code across state lines, for the purposes of sticking your extremities into it? Thank you.
didn’t microsoft try to use c# and .net to write vista with , failed , and spent the next 2.5 years doing it again in C++ (adding to an older codebase) ?
If thats the case , then the dogfooding failed badly, and a lot of people are using a framework they shouldn’t be trusting.
It is my understanding that world wide electricy runs at roughly the same watts.
Watts = Volts * amps (I).
So what happens when you drop 240 to 110? The amps more than doubles.
What is it that kills you? Normally the amps. Thinking of it like water, Volts is the volume of water Amps is the speed. Sure - lots of water CAN kill you, but even a tiny amount of water can cut you in half if it is going fast enough (check out what water does to the Apple laptop cases… that’s how they cut them). So both are dangerous, but amps is normally the killer.
That’s my understanding as to why the 110V is deadlier. But my hat goes off to any sparkie (electrician). Imagine working with somthing every day that you can’t see and can’t smell, but if you touch it you die.
@A UK Developer
Actually - I agree with you. I believe that all safety equipment should be optional for people. How else is darwinian evelution going to keep going? But, any worker in any company I run WILL adhear to all safety or not work for me. What they do in their spare time is up to theim - even if they want to go bungy jumping without the bungy cord.
220V, or 440V on the other hand, is likely to kill you immediately.
Its not the voltage that kills you, its the amps. Generally, currents approaching 100 mA are lethal if they pass through sensitive portions of the body. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_shock)
Not all of us create e-mail clients.
Most of the software I get to work on, I am never allowed to use.
And there is no way in hell they could force me to work on it anyways. People always force a project down the throat of some poor time line. And some developers would do anything they can to prevent quality enforcement on how they work. ‘Who dares to defy my code!’.
I wonder how a table saw would have worked in a emotionally unstable corporate company with a tiny budget and a crunched time line…
Someone would have definitely lost a finger.
But for all I know, maybe it was going through all that
