We’re in Edinburgh, at Open Repositories 2012, and will be presenting our paper at 9am tomorrow morning (yes, that’s right, the morning after the conference dinner!). Here’s the paper we’ll be discussing.
As part of its project to develop a new research data management system the University of Lincoln is embracing development practices built around APIs – interfaces to the underlying data and functions of the system which are explicitly designed to make life easy for developers by being machine readable and programmatically accessible.
http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/5962/
Eating Your Own Dog Food
View more presentations from Nick Jackson
Well I had to read the paper through to find out why you called it eating your own dog food, though I’m still not quite sure; interesting none the less though
The phrase “eating your own dog food” originates (according to one theory) from the chairman of a dog food company who would sit at each shareholder’s meeting and eat a can of the company’s dog food, thus encouraging the company to make sure it was good enough to be eaten by ‘themselves’. In software it gained a lot of traction at Microsoft, where developers have to use their own products as part of their day to day workflow.
For us, it means that we’re actually using the same APIs that we expose for integration to build our own user-facing aspects. We can’t ever say “meh, it’s good enough” for the API, because we’ll just get annoyed at how shoddy it is later on when we use it ourselves.