Chief Of Dogfood

There’s been a bunch of long term planning going on at work recently – lots of good stuff has come out of it but I’m going to skip most of it here.  Most of the responsibility fell to the managers in the company which leaves me to actually get some work done and push our products forward.  One thing I did pick up though is the responsibility to ensure that Ephox eats it’s own dogfood.  Henceforth I am on a mission to cram our products into every conceivable place and by any available means (we use a number of hosted solutions which we can’t directly integrate our products into but JavaScript hacks are a fun pass-time so I’m sure I’ll find a way).

Perhaps more importantly though I’m charged with creating ways to quickly and easily capture the feedback that the dog-fooding process generates.  I’m thinking a simple web form that grabs just enough information and then routes it through to the right places so that it can be properly tracked by engineering.  Userfriendly, smart web forms – sounds like a job for EditLive! for XML.

Finally I need to keep all of the places our products are integrated up to date with the latest “safe to unleash on the rest of the company” builds.  Sounds like a good job for our build machine to take care of.  Hopefully one click should upload a build to all the required places without me having to worry about it.

The real challenge in all of this is getting around our highly distributed and very mish-mash set of infrastructure.  We have some systems inside the firewall, some outside, some on UNIX, some on Windows, some with FTP access, some with SCP access and some with SMB access.  Seems like a good excuse to rationalize some access methods…..