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.

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 been a better time for yak shaving!

Yak-shaving-shaming puts limits on the creativity of talented engineers by constraining them to existing patterns and practices or building on top of abstractions, and practically, that results in engineers and teams with less breadth. In an applied software world that's exploded in framework and library complexity in recent years, I think there are always going to be yaks in dire need of a shave.

My favourite Yak from Malcolm in the middle.

https://youtube.com/shorts/kSJgLA1frS4?is=2RA7C0EDEe7Mg8Fp

Tangential but it's a story that I find funny.

At a previous job, my coworkers coined the term "Thomasing" [1], referring to me, as "the act of having a question explained so thoroughly, detailed, and long-winded that the asker has lost interest in the question that they were asking".

I thought it was pretty funny, because that does basically describe me in a nutshell.

[1] Lovingly, it was a good, fairly-tight-knit group, they weren't being jerks. We all did lighthearted ribbing.

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.

The fact that programmers can be nerd sniped into yak shaving some random libraries is the only thing that keeps Open Source running.

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

I can do a LOT more yak shaving on personal projects now. I still haven't managed to finish anything though.

Good article, I even remember the Yak Shaving Day episode of Ren and Stimpy but never made the connection with the slang term

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

That is a beautiful animal.

... but it's a highland cow

So is breeding hairier and hairier yaks!

If you shave a yak, you get yak hair. And this material is like $35 a skein!

https://www.ulaandlia.com/collections/mongolian-baby-yak-woo...

Oh wait, you meant figuratively!

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