Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
seths.blog
Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
#2Yak Shaving and Bike Shedding are some of my favorite sayings.
Re: Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
#3This isn't really anything new. Sometimes, it's important to get that hose or whatever the real-world equivalent is. The real advice is to not waste time on things that aren't important. To poorly extend the metaphor, this is running to home depot to buy a pack of gum. I've caught myself a few times tweaking my i3 config or something to "increase productivity" to procrastinate something I don't want to do. The important thing is to not do that. This advice, however, is already well-known.
Re: Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
#4"Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later"
That sounds fine until hundreds of developers make this choice every single day, and your project is so riddled with technical debt that forward progress becomes hard to muster. I'll be the first to admit that I postpone or neglect Yak Shaving myself.
If we think about it the other way around, if we shaved yak every single time, then the herd would be shaved, and we'd be able to work without so many distractions.
I guess the big problem with Yak Shaving, at least for a dayjob, is that it doesn't always count towards making forward progress toward your goals or OKRs, or whatever we want to call them. I think we need to recognize the importance of Yak shaving and reward the shavers.
Re: Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
#5This is actually part of the business justification for using SaaS/PaaS instead of rolling your own. E.g. skip implementing auth when just starting and simply use Firebase.
Re: Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
#6I've been hearing this term probably since TFA was published, but it's only been recently, ~15 years into my career that I realized how much I'm guilty of this. It's so easy to get caught up in that PR for that upstream dependency so your code is a bit prettier.
I've also noticed that the low-level yak shaving I tend towards becomes much less tempting if I focus on decoupling what I'm writing. As long as a function/module I'm not super happy with is nicely isolated/decoupled, who cares? I can easily swap it out later if it becomes an issue.
Re: Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
#7[deleted]
Re: Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
#8I know nothing about waxing cars but don’t you actually need the hose? Wouldn’t the actual solution be to get to Home Depot without the EZ pass, or buying it instead of borrowing it.
This is to say that you should do the necessary steps but no more?
Re: Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
#9(2005) in case you're confused about the "five years ago" remark
Re: Don't Shave That Yak (2005)
#10> Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occurs when you find something you need to do. “I want to wax the car today.”
> “Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I’ll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.”
...
> So, what to do?
> Don’t go to Home Depot for the hose.
This analogy is rather awful. The takeaway I'm getting from this is "if you hit an obstacle, stop trying." Surely that isn't what the author is trying to tell us?