GoKawiilBut yak shaving is fun
The joy of building from scratch 2019.07.31
KO | EN
This blog doesn’t use a static site generator or framework like Jekyll, Hugo, or Gatsby. I tried a few of them at first, but they gave me too little freedom to customize, so I decided to build the blog myself. Early on I just wrote posts in HTML, but that was so inconvenient that I built a system for writing posts as JSON files. That too was awkward for longer pieces, so I developed a service that converts Markdown files into HTML files. Then I built a tool to compile and deploy the resulting files. In the end, I’d built a static site generator from scratch.
This kind of thing is called yak shaving. The term was coined by Carlin Vieri, a PhD student at the MIT AI Lab, and it refers to doing a chain of related tasks for a single goal until you lose the original purpose entirely and end up on something completely unrelated. An example mentioned on LangDev IRC makes it clear why it’s called yak shaving.
I get an axe to chop down a tree. The axe is too dull, so I go looking for a stone to sharpen it. But I hear that a certain village has a really good stone. I get a yak to travel to that village. The yak’s hair is too long, so I start shaving it.
There’s also an example from Seth Godin, the entrepreneur, marketer, and author.
“I should wash the car today.” “Oh no, the hose is busted. I’d better buy a new one at Home Depot.” “But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee Bridge. I have to go through the toll, so I need an E-ZPass.” “Wait! I think I could borrow my neighbor’s E-ZPass…” “But Bob won’t lend me his E-ZPass until my son returns the pillow he borrowed.” “The pillow has shed so much yak hair that I can’t just give it back. I’ll have to restuff it with yak hair.” And so, just to wash the car, I end up at the zoo shaving a yak.
Both stories came after the term yak shaving was coined; the term itself was actually born somewhere else. Carlin Vieri, who had played hockey late into a Tuesday night, was eating dinner in the middle of the night and watching TV. On TV was the Yak Shaving Day episode of the cartoon The Ren & Stimpy Show. The plot goes like this:
Yak Shaving Day is five days off. Ren and Stimpy decorate the house by hanging a dirty diaper on the wall and pouring coleslaw into their boots. Then they set shaving cream and a razor on the bathroom sink and pray that a shaved yak will fly in on a magic kayak and bring them gifts. That night, the yak emerges from the bathtub drain, shaves, and leaves a gift in the sink before going: the very scum of the cream it used to shave.
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