Will O'Beirne

Engineering Manager

<p>When I was a Senior Engineer at OkCupid, an online dating platform, we found that developers who were single often gave the strongest product feedback. This really taught us how thoughts and ideas change when we have a vested interest in a solution.</p>

<p>Now I’m at Coder where we are building the best remote development platform for teams. Since developers are our target users, we realized that our own engineers are our #1 customer. </p>

<p>We then decided to take the idea of testing our own product one step further. We decided to build our solution by using our solution.</p>

<p><strong>What does this mean?</strong> For starters, all of our engineers use our products, a process known as dogfooding. As our product is a software development platform, we&#39;re actually using code-server and Coder Enterprise to build code-server and Coder Enterprise. Pretty meta, right? </p>

<p>Here’s what we’ve learned so far:</p>


<h2>1. Developer Experience: Look &amp; feel make a big difference</h2>

<p>Like a lot of early-stage software products, design was not initially a top priority for us. However, as our platform matured and we started using it full time, we saw how important it was to create a design and experience that made the platform feel great to use.</p>

<p>It was no longer enough to build the platform just to meet the bare minimum requirements. Coder had to be a product that our team loved to use. Subtle touches like coloring the browser&#39;s title bar to match the IDEs theme, or remembering the size and position of the user’s terminal windows made a surprisingly large difference in how we felt about using our own product.</p>

<p>Dogfooding enabled us to design a solution that we love to use — and we hope you do too.</p>


<h2>2. Functionality: We can better anticipate our customers’ needs and build relevant features</h2>

<p>One example of this is a feature we call “Dev URLs.” At first, it was nothing special, but it quickly became essential. Basically, it exposes a port from the remote environment so a developer can view and test their apps (ex. SSH port forwarding).</p>

<p>Initially, we were often frustrated that we had no easy way to quickly collaborate and share our progress or report a bug with other people on the team. Because we were all using our platform, we discovered that we could just modify our Dev URLs feature to support this type of public or team-wide sharing.  Today, Dev URLs are one of our most popular features! </p>

<p>Dogfooding allowed us to discover a need and ship a solution before any of our public-facing customers knew they needed it.</p>


<h2>3. Reliability: Fewer bugs make it to customers</h2>

<p>Since all of our engineers use the pre-release version of Coder daily, we are able to catch errors far before the product is in customers’ hands. While this one may seem obvious, it has had a substantial impact on our platform stability. We are essentially doing QA testing every minute of every day rather than passing it off to another team right before release and hoping they don’t find anything major that will delay the release.</p>

<p>Dogfooding enables us to find bugs quickly and release a more stable and reliable solution.</p>


<h2>Dogfooding has its costs but... we feel it is definitely worth it</h2>

<p>There are, of course, some complications that surface when using Coder Enterprise to develop itself. Sometimes we run into chicken/egg problems. We also realized that we needed to create and maintain a feature-flagging system for our internal projects, which took a good amount of dev time. However this ultimately leads to better software quality.</p>

<p>Our dogfooding initiative does not mean engineers can just prioritize our favorite features in the roadmap. As engineers and a company, our goal is to create a platform that works for our customers and development teams everywhere  —  not just us. Dogfooding, though, gives us a pretty good idea about what it will take to achieve that goal, and a vested interest in getting there. It can sometimes be hard to swallow, but ultimately it is worth it. And some days, when the code is flowing and everything is working just right, it tastes better than ice cream!</p>

<p>--</p>

<p>Coder is <a href="https://coder.com/trial">free to try</a> for 60 days! For more information, you can also <a href="https://coder.com/contact">contact us</a>.</p>


At Coder, our own engineers are our #1 customer.

Dogfooding: What we’ve learned using Coder to build Coder

<p>I’m coming up on my one-year anniversary at <a href="https://coder.com/">Coder</a>, an Austin-based startup working on moving the development experience to the cloud. Joining a new company is always an interesting experience  — you inevitably change the company with the expertise you bring in, but the company also  changes you and the way you work. So I thought it would be good to reflect on what this first year’s been like, and to share that with anyone who might be curious about working at Coder.</p>

<h2>Coder’s product is a joy to work with</h2>

<p>I had some skepticism about moving all of my development to the cloud before joining Coder, but now that I’ve gotten to work with it, it’s hard to go back to my old local workflow. Having a consistent development environment, being able to share my in-progress projects just by sharing a URL, and having my dev environment  accessible from any computer have all been huge improvements to my productivity.</p>

<h2>Our own engineers are our #1 customer</h2>

<p>We build <a href="https://github.com/cdr/code-server">code-server</a> and <a href="http://enterprise.coder.com/">Coder Enterprise</a> using code-server and Coder Enterprise. Every improvement we make in our products is an improvement for ourselves, which we pass on to our customers.</p>


At Coder, we develop on Coder Enterprise from within Coder Enterprise. Pretty meta, right?

<h2>The engineering team is the main driver for product decisions</h2>

<p>Since we’re all developers ourselves, <a href="https://coder.com/blog/dogfooding-what-we-ve-learned-using-coder-to-build-coder">we’re also our own target audience</a>. This also makes us our harshest critics, and keeps us at a high standard for quality.</p>

<h2>Open source is core to Coder’s ethos</h2>

<p>The team is always looking at new and existing code as opportunities to spin out open source projects. The community that has formed around code-server is why Coder is where it is today, and the team is committed to keeping those roots.</p>

<h2>Coder challenges me as an engineer</h2>

<p>Projects at past companies I’ve worked at mostly boiled down to putting a veneer on a CRUD interface. Coder has me exploring the limits of what the browser can do, learning the ins and outs of Kubernetes, and rendering desktop IDEs in the browser using WebGL.</p>


JetBrain’s GoLand editor rendered with WebGL in a Chrome PWA. This ain’t your Grandma’s VDI.

<h2>Coder’s customers are their partners</h2>

<p>A large part of the sales process is making sure that adoption of Coder’s tools will truly meet customers’ needs, which results in product feedback that is much higher quality. That quality feedback helps shape the product.</p>

<h2>Transitioning to a remote company wasn’t half-assed</h2>

<p>Coder has put a lot of effort into maintaining the company culture, and keeping people in high spirits during a very difficult time. Regular cross-team video coffee chats, 1:1s with every new employee, weekly game nights, and self-organized clubs have done a lot to keep the team’s camaraderie going.</p>


Nothing builds teams better than a round of Fall Guys with your coworkers.

<h2>Opening the hiring pool was a huge win</h2>

<p>The available talent pool for interviews and the diversity of the company has <a href="https://coder.com/blog/how-the-pandemic-helped-change-coder-s-diversity-recruitment-strategy">thrived with the change to remote</a>. We’ve had a huge number of quality people from all over join the team, and that wouldn’t have been possible if we were limited to hiring in Austin.</p>

<h2>Coder has seen success in spite of the pandemic</h2>

<p>I’ve been extremely fortunate to be at a company that’s been able to grow like we have, even in these uncertain times. It’s given me the flexibility to balance my personal life and work life when needed. And it feels good to work on a product that’s helping other teams cope with stay-at-home orders.
<hr>
All in all, it’s been a fantastic first year at Coder. It’s exciting to be a part of the team and along for the ride. If any of this resonated with you, the team at Coder is growing fast, and we are always looking for passionate and talented teammates. <a href="https://coder.com/company">See what positions are open today</a>.</p>


As he nears his one-year anniversary at Coder, engineering manager Will O'Beirne reflects on his time at the company and what makes it special. 



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