It's common in the software industry to hear the phrase "Eat your own dog food". It's so common that Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the phrase . The idea is that a software developer should also be a user of the software they are developing. By analogy someone making dog food should make it good enough that they'll eat it themselves. The phrase has been around since at least the 1980s, but I recently came across a much earlier expression of the same idea. And this came from one of the X-15 test pilots: Milton Thompson. Some models of the X-15 contained a device that mixed the aircraft controls of the X-15 with the rocket controls. Since the X-15 would fly like a plane and a spacecraft it had both conventional airfoils and thrusters. These were originally controlled by different joysticks. The mixing device was the MH-96 and enabled the pilot to fly the X-15 in the atmosphere or in space using a single joystick. But that meant that the MH-96 was contr