Eating My Own (EO) Dog Food

My favourite origin story for the expression "eating your own dog food" is that it originates from Clement L. Hirsch, president of Kal Kan Pet Food in the early 20th century. He was said to eat a can of his company's dog food at shareholder meetings. It was a clear statement of his faith in the product.

In 1988 Paul Martiz, a manager at Microsoft, established the saying in the modern lexicon by sending an email with the subject line, "Eating Your Own Dogfood", his purpose being to challenge colleagues to increase internal usage of the company's product. If the product is so good, he was asking, why don't we all use it?

I use Earth Blox. Almost every day. I love how I can explore EO data, anywhere in the world, literally within minutes. Access data. View time series. Extract metrics. Download GeoTIFFs. And more. All in the time it takes to drag-and-drop a few blocks together.

Connections of mine will notice I promote Earth Blox a lot. Yes, before anyone asks, I do have interests in the company, as one of the people who helped get it started, and in my university role I currently collaborate with the Earth Blox team on several projects that are developing the product for education, adding new features every week.

But that is not the source of my excitement for Earth Blox. I use it because it's quick, easy, and gets the job done.

I am perhaps in the sweet spot of potential users of Earth Blox: I know a little about remote sensing (OK, I know quite a lot, but you don't have to know a lot to use Earth Blox), but I have neither the time nor the inclination to teach myself Javascript or Python. For years I have wanted to tap into the fantastic resource of Google's Earth Engine but I've never found the time to master Javascript. And that is why we invented Earth Blox. Intuitive and super simple to use. The power and vast data resource of Earth Engine as the foundation, but with scope for your own data or alternative data feeds. The flexibility to do things on my own, in my own way. Perfect for anyone in business or academia who values speed, simplicity and the ability to share across a team... and doesn't want to learn JavaScript!

And because it's a web tool (no installation required), not only can I use it anywhere, anytime, but so can my students! In this last year under Covid restrictions, this has been invaluable - all the students need is a web browser and a half-decent internet. Other features, such as being able to build a workflow and then instantly share it with the whole class, or being able to upload your own areas of interest, simply adds to the ease of using Earth Blox for classes. And the class size is no longer limited by the size of the computer lab, so even more people can learn about the wonders of satellite observations.

Over the last six months, The University of Edinburgh has been working with Earth Blox to help modify their enterprise-level tool into a teaching tool. This has been funded by ESA and the UK Space Agency, and the outputs of this work will be a new MOOC and a new credit-bearing ODL course, both due in the coming months. Both of these will use Earth Blox as a unique way to allow participants to engage with the data as they learn. The feedback from students is summed up by one email: "Had a look on Earth Blox – super surprised at how quickly I got the hang of it!!"

Next month, as part of our ESA project, I will be running a workshop on how I (and others) are using Earth Blox for teaching. If you want to attend and learn more, please drop me an email or DM, as we will be limiting attendance to 30 attendees.

Earth Blox also now have a trial version for institutions, organisations and businesses to try it out for themselves. Please sign up at www.blox.earth