Shanghai Tech Writer

Ever heard that expression before? That’s what we do here at National Instruments! We eat our own dog food.

Here are two definitions I found on the web:

An expression describing the act of a company using its own products for day-to-day operations. — Investopedia

When a computer company uses its own software for internal projects, it is said to be “eating its own dog food.” This phrase, made famous by microserfs, has been shortened to simply a verb, as in, “We’ve got to dog-food that product” (meaning we’ve got to start using our own product internally at our company). — Netlingo

The other day, Tom at I’d Rather Be Writing asked me what tools we use for creating and compiling our help files. At first, I was thinking about all the fancy and expensive professional documentation tools out there like Flare, Captivate, Camtasia Studio, SnagIt, RoboHelp, etc. . . none of which we use. Matter of fact, we use free and cheap software like FAR Help. I was almost embarrassed, wondering whether we’ve resorted to cost-cutting measures in our documentation process. But then I realized something else.

While we don’t use fancy commercial software with all the bells and whistles, we have a lot of internal tools we’ve created ourselves here at the NI lab. These tools are created using LabVIEW, NI’s flagship product. Basically, LabVIEW is a graphical programming software designed mainly for the measurement and automation industry. The software gives users the flexibility to create user-defined test, measurement, and control applications.

As technical writers, we don’t really understand the whole automation, measurement, and testing stuff, but we certainly know how to apply our product to practical use! Our job is to understand how LabVIEW works and how the software can be used in real-world applications. We write documentation, help files, and tutorials for LabVIEW. Then we use LabVIEW to create our own tools to facilitate and simplify the documentation process. Talk about putting our documentation to real practical use! While we do use a few commercial software like Altova XMLSpy and Adobe FrameMaker, our best tools are the ones we’ve created for ourselves!

The process of writing, creating, and compiling documentation is a long and tedious process. Many steps are required before the final help file is created. We’ve created hundreds of tools to perform various tasks such as generating HTML from a database, validating help files, spell-check, compiling, taking screenshots, etc. . . and all these tools are automated so that we always have the newest build of documentation every morning. I’ve created a tool to automatically copy my project files to my desktop every day.

That’s really what LabVIEW is all about—creating user-defined solutions!

Yes, we eat our own dog food. The best dog foods are the ones that the makers eat themselves, fully tested for bugs, usability, and usefulness! Beware of companies that don’t eat their own dog food, like mentioned in this article.

One random note regarding dog food. There’s this huge safety issue thing regarding dog food (as in the food dogs eat) made in China. I guess that’s one reason why you don’t find many dogs on the streets. Either they ate their own dog food and died . . . or they were eaten by the Chinese. (Something got lost in the translation — “eat your own dog”)

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