> Both stories came after the term yak shaving was coined
They are yakocryphal. A real yakrilege to spread such nonsense.
But yak shaving is fun (2019)
31–40 of 100 posts
Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)
#32the version I learnt the phrase from had the end of the chain as
- oh we should paint it
- we need a paintbrush
- I hear yak hair makes the best paintbrushes
- here I am, shaving a yak
made more sense than the examples given in the op
Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)
#33I love this. My very own static site generator, Teeny [1], is going on five years now. It's 350 lines of hand-written JS and has powered all my blogs and personal websites for years. It currently powers https://yakko.dev.
I added plugins this year which made it really powerful and allows me to keep the core small.
Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)
#34I 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 dedicate…
Call it a pivot and away you go!
Stewart Butterfield shaved the shit out of two yaks at his video games company, which eventually became Flickr and Slack.
Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)
#35As in most things I think it's a mixture of quantity and set and setting.
I enjoy a yak, but right sizing my yak is pretty important to my enjoyment of it. Maybe the yak doesn't get a full shave but gets a trendy hair cut, and that's okay.
I leave my yaks at home when I go to other engineers decision meetings, project kickoffs, or RFCs.
Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)
#36Yak shaving is only fun when you don't have managers who don't care about the circumstances breathing down your neck.
Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)
#37Yak shaving is only fun when you don't have managers who don't care about the circumstances breathing down your neck.
That is true for software engineering in general. If you have a manager like that nothing is fun. And the products you build are likely to be bad.
Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)
#38I can do a LOT more yak shaving on personal projects now. I still haven't managed to finish anything though.
This so much.
Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)
#39Maybe the most beautiful examples of the joy and importance of yak shaving that I’ve ever come across is inheritance machining on youtube. [1]
But truthfully part of the process of creating in general is yak shaving… as is so often said “trust the process”.
Arguably, the entire concept of tech debt is owed to the lack of yak shaving.
Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)
#40the version I learnt the phrase from had the end of the chain as - oh we should paint it - we need a paintbrush - I hear yak hair makes the best paintbrushes - here I am, shaving a yak made more sense than the examples given in the op
So yak shaving comes after bike shedding?