Developing something like Apollo is very challenging -- and very rewarding. What's most rewarding, is knowing that we are using... Apollo, in order to develop Apollo. Yes, that's right!

Apollo is a pretty big project, and it requires intense collaboration amongst those who work on it. I am the project's black sheep -- I am in Australia, which is a little "out of the way" so to speak. With the rest of the team a few thousand miles from me, we use Apollo every day in order to make things happen. And it works!

This is interesting, especially because we are pretty demanding users, and well, it puts everything under a different perspective. Making improvements to the software is not just important for our users -- it's actually important to us. When the messaging system was still under development (and yes, we were stubbornly using it), we _really_ felt it when an important feature was missing.

So, the improvements we make are not solely customer-oriented. We improve Apollo so that we can work better, using Apollo. It's a pretty dramatic shift, and definitely an interesting one. We definitely eat our own dog food, and we are pretty proud of it. Apollo's Apollo powered -- how much better can it really get?

Merc.