On Dogfooding : Charity begins at home, Change begins in the self.

[note: half baked, but posted as i might not work on this in the near future]

When I was a school going kid, I used to think that I could change the world, I could bring change in society and as time passed by I realized i couldn’t even bring a positive change to myself. How could i change anything in anyone when I was stiff enough to not be changed. If I am not open enough for change, how could I motivate anyone else to take on a change. Everyone wants to change the world, everyone wants to work on that one world changing idea but in the midst of all these big ideas, people actually forget to bring any change to themselves. The whole essence of change becomes unsubstantial when you cannot apply the change to yourself, you become an idol of hypocrisy.

While this is about bringing change and understanding the whole idea of your self, one might be wondering how does it relate to dogfooding ? Well, the idea is that, when you work on a personal project, be a software/ an App(lication) and you are not using it yourself, who else would use it ?[1] Today, because of the whole opensource movement, a lot of us just want to write some piece of code and throw it in the wild thinking someone would need it and magically one day thousands of people would be using your module/componenet. In reality, this is not how it works. Most of the famous open source projects came out of a personal itch, an issue that was important for the original authors to be solved.

[1] Things change when we talk about paid projects and working for others, but this is strictly in the sense of personal projects.