Eat what you cook

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eat what you cook (or eating what you cook, or eating your own cooking) is a metaphor for the IndieWeb principle “use what you make”, encouraging creators to consume what they create, in particular on their personal website, and a more palatable replacement for the selfdogfood metaphor.

On the IndieWeb, “eat what you cook” means using your creations on your personal site as an aspect of your primary online identity, day to day.

eating what they cook

Use “eating what they cook” instead of “selfdogfooding” to describe creators using their creations. In the past, we have described users of projects or services they created as "selfdogfooding". If you find such uses on pages, replace them with a link to [[eating what they cook]].

Thoughts

• " And this is why we (here) have the principle / pressure of eat what you cook, because it focuses on the need (to eat!) rather than the process of spending hours cooking, and never eating" from tantek in chat (https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2021-09-16#t1631815786178300).
  • capjamesg responded: That's the reason I came to the IndieWeb. I have never felt I had to do anything from scratch to particulate [sic]. And so I felt a whole lot more welcomed!"

• An app can be a home-cooked meal by Robin Sloan: "I am the programming equivalent of a home cook. […] This messaging app I built for, and with, my family, it won’t change unless we want it to change. There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty?"

• 2013-01-03 Forrester: Product Management: Should You Eat Your Own Cooking?

  Would you purchase a car from a BMW salesperson who drives a Honda? Would you eat at a restaurant where the chef doesn’t eat the restaurant’s food?

  …

  I’d also like to emphasize the distinction between “tasting your own cooking” and “eating your own cooking.” Chefs regularly taste their own cooking to determine if the recipe is right, but that’s different than eating the full dish for its nutritional value and sustenance.

  …

  So, when does it make sense to taste your own cooking? When does it make sense to eat it? And when does it make sense to do neither? Tally up how many times you answer “yes” to the following questions:

• ...

Variants

Taste your own cooking

The metaphor ”taste your own cooking” is something you can do both as part of creating something, and with the finished result, before committing to eating it (why would you eat it if it tasted bad).

• 2013-04-11 Taste Your Own Cooking

  We need to understand the products, services and experiences we create for others thoroughly and completely, and that can only be done by using what we provide.

• 2023-01-20 https://ohai.social/@AnokheeTara/109736149516623200

  I’ll be adding “taste your own cooking” to my vocab too

The word "taste" also alliterates well with "test", and serves as a good reminder to test your work-in-progress, as a chef might taste the dishes while they are preparing them to see what changes they might need.

History

"Eat what you cook" was deliberately chosen by the community among a few proposals to supersede selfdogfooding due to various problematic aspects of dogfood as a metaphor.

• See discussion in selfdogfood#eat_your_cooking and consider incorporating into this section
  • Kevin Marks: http://known.kevinmarks.com/2018/the-problem-with-self-dogfooding-was-summed-up-by-shaw-do The problem with self-dogfooding was summed up by Shaw: “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.” #indieweb]
  • Kevin Marks: Renaming selfdogfooding to "eat what you cook" #indieweb

See Also

• cook what you want (formerly scratch_your_own_itch#Cook_What_You_Want)
• use what you make
• principles
• test in production