But yak shaving is fun

108

pparksb about 5 hours ago 26 commentsRead Article on parksb.github.io

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Discussion (26 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

monocultured•42 minutes ago

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.

thimabi•about 1 hour ago

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!

mordymoop•31 minutes ago

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.

danielrmay•about 1 hour ago

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.

jihadjihad•14 minutes ago

OT, but the image in TFA is not of a yak, but Highland cattle [0].

Yaks [1] have a shoulder hump you can't miss.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_cattle

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yak

tombert•about 2 hours ago

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.

kown7•about 2 hours ago

My favourite Yak from Malcolm in the middle.

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

shagie•35 minutes ago

(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)

jbonatakis•about 1 hour ago

I’ll never not watch this when it’s posted

dan_sbl•about 2 hours ago

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.

vidarh•about 2 hours ago

They are different things. There are projects where I deeply care about the code, and projects where I deeply care about the end result. And a whole lot in between, or that are entirely throwaway.

But I use AI also for some of the ones where I deeply care about the code, now. E.g. my terminal is in Ruby, and it worked well enough, but over the last couple of days I had Claude put together a test harness and burn down a number of sharp corners and refactor the code. It's not perfect still, but it's cleaner than it was because I didn't have time to do enough yak shaving myself. I do care about that codebase, because I have other things I want to use it for, and not having to do it all manually gave me enough time to get it to a far better state.

I feel like a lot of the split comes from people who are a whole lot less overcommitted. If you have way too many projects, you pick and choose which projects you want to lovingly care for and which ones you just want to advance the functionality of as fast as possible. Sometimes those are one and the same at different times.

Bukhmanizer•about 1 hour ago

I’d argue most businesses have had their start through yak shaving.

I’ve found that the overuse of AI papers over a lot of problems. Then if things start failing people have no idea where or what to start fixing. I’m very much a destination person, but I’ve been on enough rides which crashed and burned to be cautious about it.

_def•about 2 hours ago

In my experience it's not as simple and depends on a whole lot of circumstances: generally I am interested to learn and to build. Give me pressure through dysfunctional processes, understaffed teams, unrealistic standards, too strong peer opinions- etc - and I'll happily reach for the shortest path.

gavmor•about 1 hour ago

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

add-sub-mul-div•about 2 hours ago

It makes me of the difference between the indie developer who labored over Stardew Valley vs. (for example) Square Enix putting out a farming sim because their committee of suits decided they wanted revenue from that genre.

pydry•about 2 hours ago

i think what's really splitting it might actually be differing levels of slop tolerance.

kazinator•13 minutes ago

> Both stories came after the term yak shaving was coined

They are yakocryphal. A real yakrilege to spread such nonsense.

zby•about 2 hours ago

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

spelunker•about 2 hours ago

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

caycep•about 1 hour ago

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

wccrawford•37 minutes ago

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.

jemiluv8•about 1 hour ago

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

bigfishrunning•about 2 hours ago

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

Cider9986•about 1 hour ago

That is a beautiful animal.

hippopotenuse•about 2 hours ago

... but it's a highland cow

DonHopkins•about 1 hour ago

So is breeding hairier and hairier yaks!

mystraline•about 2 hours ago

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!