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But yak shaving is fun (2019)

parksb.github.io

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Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#22

Post by gavmor »

dan_sbl wrote: post #5

This feels like what is really splitting the programming community right now- those that have typically enjoyed the journey, and those that just want to be at the destination as soon as possible.

Riding horseback saves time over walking but it's harder to smell the roses along the way. Nevertheless, millions now ride horses recreationally.

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#23

Post by jemiluv8 »

Glad you gave yak-shaving a proper definition. I was always annoyed at my boss for insisting on a particular arrangement of import statements in typescript files. For him, it was a way of telling us to be more mindful of the code we typed. But mostly I’d have preferred a simple eslint config with autofix on save. This kinda yak shaving is no fun - trust me

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#25

Post by monocultured »

I was taken by Christopher Priests book The Extremes and sat down to write a blog post about what compelled me so much about it, and wanted to add some gifs to it. In particular the "deja vu" scene from The Matrix, but I couldn't find it, and I no longer have an old version of Photoshop around to create the gif myself, and three weeks (and many tokens later) I'm finishing up an xcode MacOS native app that is dedicated to generating gifs. I've still not written the blog post.

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#26

Post by wccrawford »

caycep wrote: post #24

Gen Z calls this "side questing" now...

I can't blame them. I instantly know what they mean when they use that phrase, but I have to think just a little bit to remember what "yak shaving" means. It's a cute name, but it's not intuitive at all. You have to learn it.

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#27

Post by shagie »

kown7 wrote: post #7

My favourite Yak from Malcolm in the middle. https://youtube.com/shorts/kSJgLA1frS4?is=2RA7C0EDEe7Mg8Fp

(Non short video format - https://youtu.be/AbSehcT19u0 ... When in the office I had a QR code of that so people could scan it and understand what I was working on)

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#28

Post by mordymoop »

thimabi wrote: post #19

I always liked yak shaving, but avoided it because I knew it came with costs and tradeoffs. More recently, with the help of AI, I’ve been doing lots of it, as the costs and tradeoffs have greatly diminished. In fact, I’ve learned that building my own tools and frameworks, when done properly, comes with huge performance benefits and helps me understand the problems I’m trying to solve much more deeply. There has never…

Personally, I find it difficult to competently reason about a system unless I've built my own version of that system. So if you make a practice of building your own versions of things, you end up with a more robust mental library of how stuff works. For this reason, I've never seen yak shaving as a waste of time. The yak shaving was at least 50% about loading the abstractions into my brain fully.
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