One of my dogs with the Monday feels.

dog fooding can sometimes give you the monday feels (as one of my dog demonstrates)

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I firmly believe that developers should be dog fooding their own work.

This isn’t to say that I don’t believe that assembling a team of beta testers is unimportant – on the contrary – but if you’re building something, and the only people who have experience using said product are people other than you, then I think that’s a problem.

So as of today, I’m proud (if not a little bit embarrassed) to be officially test-driving Mayer – my next WordPress theme that I’ve been discussing for sometime.

Test Your Own Work

Though I’ll likely give a much more detailed post about the actual product once it’s released, suffice it to say that I’ve been working on this particular theme in my free time since September of last year.

I’m happy with its progress, I’m  proud and incredibly appreciative of my beta testers for uncovering the bugs and issues that they’ve found (so much so that I’ll give them their own props in a later post :), but it’s time to actual put this thing into practical use so I can begin to shake out the issues in my own experience.

Mayer Release Candidate

If you’re reading this via RSS, this is what you’re missing.

And as much as I appreciate the feedback from my testers, I think we should all test our own work:

  • If you’re building something for yourself, you’ve gotta use it for yourself. That’s common sense.
  • Even though developers are close to the project they build and know how it works (and thus, how to use it in its best capacity), there are bound to be times where you hit up against something that you didn’t consider during development.
  • Nothing beats real world experience. Get the stuff in front of other people.

There are still a few issues that I’ve yet to resolve namely around the responsive functionality, but it’s getting really close to launch (which, again, I’ll discuss more later), but I wanted to go ahead and begin putting it into use so that I can begin addressing any edge cases that are missed throughout the testing process.

With that said, if you notice anything odd or out of place while viewing this site, please don’t hesitate to contact me via email (as it makes it easier for me to track issues that way).

Anyway, Reid said it best:

If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

With that said, this is just a minor announcement in between, you know, regularly scheduled posts :).

Comments on this post are closed. Email me any feedback you have regarding your experience.