While planning out the next steps for my fitness app, the question crossed my mind, “should I use my own API to actually power the backend of my app?” After a little research, that is where I learned the pros and cons of “eating your own dog food.” Gotta love how technology professionals communicate.
The gist of the meaning is that as technology professionals, one way to ensure you are putting out something good is to use it yourself. Makes good sense, right? From the perspective of being an easy way to work out the kinks in something or discover valuable features, I love it.
On the other side of the coin, it may not be the most efficient. In this case, if I am producing an API to pull data from backend sources, only to repackage its display, and everything is contained within it’s own VPC (virtual private cloud), the most efficient thing to do would be to query those resources directly.
In the end, I will probably do a little bit of both, depending on where my focus is at the time. When I’m keyed in on making the API the best it can be, I’ll be dining on some dog food to try and eliminate any surprises before I release it into the wild. When I’m focused on the app, performance and efficiency will be the name of the game.
This post was inspired by the uber smart folks on this thread at Stack Exchange. Gotta love all of those stack overflow style resources and forums when you’ve got a technical question that needs answering.