I can’t remember when, but I recently heard someone use the term dogfooding, as in a shorthand verb form of eating your own dog food. Every noun in tech becomes a verb, usually when it gets to marketing or sales, but this one made me roll my eyes a bit more than usual.

My wife had never heard the term, which is a bit ironic, since she actually works in the dog food industry. I have mixed feelings about it, although it’s marginally better than “drinking your own champagne,” because I don’t drink, and when I did, champagne was second only to tequila as the alcoholic beverage I disliked the most. But in the late nineties in the tech industry, they would roll out champagne almost as much as they would print team t-shirts. Anyway.

The term “eating your own dog food” is supposed to mean using the tools your company makes to actually operate your company. If your company makes bug tracking software, you shouldn’t be paying Atlassian to use Jira; you should be using your own software, to show customers that it actually works.

(Side note: I’ve always called it JIRA. I started at the new place, and everyone was saying Jira. Turns out the name changed in September of 2017. See here. This is partly the trend of making everything lowercase, and partly testimony to how infrequently the last place updated their software.)

So, the actual news here is that I’m “dogfooding” by moving this site away from Wordpress and doing it all with a static site generator. This is the same docs-as-code approach I do at my job. That means:

  • Writing everything in Markdown.
  • Using Atom as my editor.
  • Using Jekyll as the SSG.
  • Using the Minima theme with some customization, most notably pagination.
  • Pushing it all to GitHub.
  • Hosting it with GitHub pages.

There’s lots to cover here, and also not everything is done. My redirect from jonkonrath.com to the new hosted site is a bit of a hack, and I’ve barely started any page design. I’ll get to that, and I plan to explain all of it as I go. But first, I need to go eat something other than dog food for lunch and not think about Alpo.