Master Class in Yak Shaving
Written on June 21st , 2022 by Sean Webster
According to google,
Yak shaving is programming lingo for the seemingly endless series of small tasks that have to be completed before the next step in a project can move forward
I first heard the term years ago, and I can’t remember the source. Here’s a great example
Interestingly (to me) enough, the source of the original phrase stems from Ren and Stimpy’s Shaven Yak of Yaksmas Eve
The term supposedly stems from the nonsensical preparation of odd tasks for the coming of the Shaven Yak.
You get the idea.
So, yes, I’d like to make an embedded project, and to document it along the way, so I had to make a blog. I decided I didn’t quite like blogger so I checked out github pages. I’ve never touched ruby before, so that’s pretty neat. So here we are, on github pages.
Having only made one page on blogger, rather than fuss with tools to migrate to ghpages, I chose to copy and reformat. Migration seems to exist and looks to be relatively simple in some cases
As for general blog things, these things usually have pictures, right? Well, I’m fuzzy on copyright usage, etc. While I look into that, here’s a picture of a North American Carpenter Bee on a pumpkin flower from my garden that I took on my Samsung Galaxy s9+. It really should be a yak, shouldn’t it? I’ve also switched to Millennial theme, a free jekyll theme thanks to Paul Le.
I’ve also taken the liberty of adding a photo to my first post. It’s a New England Cottontail, taken in my yard with
my Nikon D3400. I guess this is a good outlet to post my photos? Maybe, some day, they’ll be related to the posts.
But, yes, yak shaving. Every good (or not) project starts with a healthy dose of yak shaving. Especially with tools.
7/5/2022 Update
I wanted comments on my blog, and found an open source github pages app called utteranc It works by attaching comments of a github repo to a blog. It was relatively easy to set up.
I also wanted the ability to embed videos in my blog posts. I found nathancy’s jekyll-embed-video which is a rather nice, clean solution. Very easy to set up.
7/13/2022 Update
I guess I’m just throwing blog updates here? I’ve added google analytics, with the help of this site
08/09/2022 Update
I’ve added an auto table of content generator called jekyll-toc by toshumaru