Dog food never tasted better

I usually write about more technical topics — but I just wanted to share a small story about how using my own side-project really made my day.

I was doing some coding for the great people at dorbel.com, when I ran into an issue that required getting some stats from the Google Analytics API, on a Node.js server. It didn’t take me long to npm install googleapis, the official Google API client for Node. The Readme file was pretty helpful in getting me started, and then I moved onto the Reference Docs. Those were alright, but since the package really covers a lot of services — they didn’t go into a lot of detail. I soon found myself going back and forth between trying out stuff in the REPL, The Google Analytics developer page, The Google API Explorer, The Developer Console, and some SO questions…

I knew what method I wanted to use, but I couldn’t find the direct documentation for it. And then I remembered — this is why I built libhive !

What’s that code example site called again?

So I quickly opened the libhive googleapis page, found the examples for the method I needed (analytics) — and from there it was a breeze!

I quickly understood what I was missing, and I also saw how other people implemented similar issues.

“Eating my own dog food” was really fun for me — it strengthened my belief that my side-project is useful, and I hope other people will find it useful for their day-to-day work as well.

Also “eating your own dog food”? I’d be happy to hear any of your stories - or feedback about mine - in the comments below. Thanks :D