The Ultimate Dogfooding Story

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001217.html

by bdotdub • 17 years ago

70 34 17 years ago

wallflower4• 17 years ago

Lest you think he started with the finger - it was hot dogs first...

"Ultimately, it seemed like the most reliable technique would have to involve contact detection, Gass recalls. And because your body has an electrical capacitance, it offers the potential for that. I figured that if you put a voltage into the saw blade, your body could absorb some of that signal. Then the voltage in the saw blade would drop.

Within a week, Gass formulated most of the idea’s details in his mind. Thirty days later, he completed his first working prototype. Initially, he tested the prototype by touching the side of the saw blade with a finger. And while that proved the saw could stop in a fraction of a second, he still didn’t know if it was quick enough to prevent serious injury. Gass wondered how deep a 4,000-rpm saw blade would cut into human flesh during the microseconds that it took to stop the blade. To answer that, he needed to touch the blade teeth.

"I came up with the idea of using hot dogs, and it worked pretty well," Gass says. "It’s cheap, readily available, and you don’t get any protesters coming to your door."

From a Design News article - he was chosen as DN's Engineer of The Year 2007 (aside: DN is one of the best pure applied engineering publications that I actually read - apply for a subscription)

http://www.designnews.com/article/print/5897-Man_on_a_Missio...

Tichy• 17 years ago

A lot of medical researchers apparently also experimented on themselves.

ramchip• 17 years ago

I work at a place where we develop microscopes (fairly powerful, laser-based microscopes). It's complicated to get the autorizations to bring biological tissues (that's our official, grant-application name for supermarket meat) into the uni lab, so most researchers just trust the calculations and image their own fingers.

My research director always uses the same finger, although it's a bit of a superstition...

khafra• 17 years ago

It is a good story. I don't know if you can call the risk of a finger "ultimate," though; when Nikola Tesla bet his life on the skin effect of very high frequency alternating current as a PR counter Edison's animal electrocution demonstrations.

aneesh• 17 years ago

You can always nitpick, but compared to what 99.9% of engineers put at stake when selling a product, putting your finger in the blade is quite the vote of confidence.

kragen• 17 years ago

If by "engineers" you mean "programmers" then yes; but I think that among actual engineers, you'll find a lot of people who ride in cars they designed, walk across bridges they designed, cut with tools they designed, drive on roads they designed, and so on.

dan_sim• 17 years ago

I don't like the principle behind the dog food. It means that you create a product good for dogs but not humans. Something not made for you. Then, when you start eating it, you improve it to a level being acceptable to you, a human.

I like to think that I create human food, a product that I need and care about if it's good or not at the start.

eru• 17 years ago

> It means that you create a product good for dogs but not humans.

That's not the original meaning of dogfooding. Compare: "Lorne Greene would tout the benefits of the dog food, and then would say it's so good that he feeds it to his own dogs."

mechanical_fish5• 17 years ago

This guy is my personal hero, but -- alas -- this is also a story about worse is better:

http://www.taunton.com/finehomebuilding/how-to/articles/saws...

"Having heard all of the various reasons put forth by the manufacturers for not doing anything, I firmly believe it simply comes down to money," says Gass. "They cannot figure out how to make more money by adding SawStop. They are not paying for the injuries that occur now, so why should they spend money to change their product to eliminate a cost they aren't bearing?"

So, although this guy has offered his safety technology to all tool manufacturers, SawStop is only available on SawStop-branded saws, which cost a bit more money, which causes people to bitch and moan, because who wants to spend money on a feature that merely prevents injuries?

The appropriate software-platform analogy is left as an exercise for the reader. ;)

wallflower4• 17 years ago

According to SawStop PR, SawStop has prevented about 150 injuries.

It appears that Stephen Gass is attempting to extort revenues.

> Here in the States the argument over licensing the SawStop technology has been hot, heavy, and plenty of it. Mr. Gass wants 8% for a license, which will add about $80USD to the cost of the typical table saw, plus the cost of the mechanism and the labour to install it. Delta, et al. balked at the price.

http://www.woodworkforums.com/showthread.php?t=60686&pag...

Woodworkers are pretty smart and safety conscious. I've taken a couple wood working classes at my local community college. As our teacher, a master woodworker, told us - "woodworking is about problem solving. it doesn't matter how you do it - there is no right or wrong - only smarter, faster, and safer. it doesn't matter how you do it, as long as it looks nice"

mechanical_fish5• 17 years ago

It appears that Stephen Gass is attempting to extort revenues.

Don't you think you should... rephrase that? I believe the term is "negotiate a price", not "extort revenues".

I'm no fan of software patents or obvious patents, but if ever an invention deserved a patent, this is it.

I'm not suggesting that this is a story of greedy companies, or of greedy inventors. I believe the companies when they say that most people aren't willing to pay an additional 8% (for a tool that will probably last a lifetime) to hedge against amputation injuries. I just don't understand that, is all. Check out this abstract from some epidemiologists:

http://www.joem.org/pt/re/joem/abstract.00043764-199610000-0...

They sampled 283 amateur and pro woodworkers in New Mexico and report that "5% of all respondents suffered partial amputations." That is a really big fraction. Obviously, I'm unlikely to saw as much wood in my life as a professional carpenter, but it still seems like my odds of losing a finger as an amateur woodworker are probably far higher than one in 100,000. They might even be on the order of 1%. Which, to me, makes SawStop a no-brainer at $80. I want the miter saw and band saw versions, too.

huhtenberg3• 17 years ago

> Woodworkers are pretty smart and safety conscious

And so are the car drivers, which doesn't prevent a vast majority of accidents from happening because of a human error.

trefn• 17 years ago

"Woodworkers are pretty smart and safety conscious."

I agree, but there can times when control slips. This is anecdotal, I know, but my Dad cut his arm off with a radial arm saw when I was 3.

My brother was a baby and he wasn't getting much sleep, so my Dad was pretty distracted at the time. He's very careful now. I sent him this video and he told me later that it gave him the shakes.

mhb• 17 years ago

Or it might be a story about the expected value of an injury which would be sustained without the technology vs. its cost. If you haven't considered what various potential injuries are worth and their probabilities and what this technology costs then you are just playing the "if it saves just one child its worth it" game.

mechanical_fish5• 17 years ago

Agreed, and see my other post for the numbers I could find with a quick Googling.

And it's true that anecdotal evidence has limited utility, but: My high school's shop teacher? Missing fingers. My wife's father, a former carpenter? Missing fingers. What does every shop teacher fret about, constantly, out loud? Fingers. I don't think we're talking about saving just one child, here. These injuries are not that rare.

LogicHoleFlaw• 17 years ago

The "if it saves just one child" problem is more of a problem when you try to force your solution and the associated costs onto other people. In a free market, where it's my own finger on the line. Well, I'd be very likely to buy a saw with this technology.

In my garage sits my grandfather's table saw. He was a pro woodworker. It's big, heavy, and runs on three-phase power. It runs like a champ, but scares the crap outta me. I use it, but am very, very careful.

Always respect your tools. Take care of them, and they will take care of you.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

I've heard of the Sawstop technology before and what I heard was very depressing if true.

Basically none of the table saw manufacturers want to deal with this guy because they are afraid or lawsuits.

The logic goes like this, right now everybody knows a table saw will maim you, there's no expectation that it won't.

But if they implement that technology, and it then fails, then there will be a BIG lawsuit.

Meanwhile everybody who uses a table saw and sees Sawstop, wants it.

But the guy is having a very difficult time setting a major manufacturing operation to ship Sawstop table saws himself.

Again, I don't know if this is true, but it's very sad if it is.

-- EDIT:

I missed this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453822

sounddust• 17 years ago

I would argue that this was a horrible decision, even if everything turned out in the end. It reminds me of when a kid makes a really stupid decision that by chance turns out well, and the parents (correctly) yell at him despite the result.

If it had turned out that there was a minor flaw/"bug" in his implementation, he'd lose his finger for no reason.

What would be much better is to make lots of test saws with his technology and give them to carpenters for free. The worst thing that could happen is that someone who would have lost their finger anyway would lose their finger. The best would be free publicity.

ComputerGuru• 17 years ago

The original video of Steve Gass sticking his own finger into the table-saw: http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/325071/6bb3c29d/time_warp_ci...

(the one on CH is of a hotdog... this one is of a real, live human digit!!!)

gruseom• 17 years ago

That's not what "eating your own dog food" means. It means using your product to do your own work. As in: if Gass were a woodworker and used the saw on his own projects, he'd get better ideas about saw design.

I like the saw story too, but its applicability to software projects is...? Here's the moral of the story offered by Atwood:

Nothing exudes confidence like software developers who are willing to stick their own extremities into the spinning blades of software they've written.

That's inane even by his standards.

huhtenberg3• 17 years ago

A guy I once worked with aptly referred to the "dog-fooding" as "feel the pain" approach.

zain• 17 years ago

Here is the video of the creator testing it with his own finger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3mzhvMgrLE

sown• 17 years ago

I seem to remember the founder of American Body Armor performing demonstrations on himself by firing a .38 revolver at himself while wearing armor ... or something. heavily paraphrased.

barbie17• 17 years ago

Is what Jeff Atwood doing even legal?!?! You can't just "quote" 80% of someone's work and then publish it as your own! In the article I counted only 6 sentences that Jess Atwood wrote himself. Can I just, say, "quote" a best seller, add a few words of commentary and then publish it? I think not.

chris11• 17 years ago

This may be the first application for table saws, but this has been around for awhile. It's basically the kind of saw that doctors use to remove casts.

The Ultimate Dogfooding Story

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