Sketchplanations
Big Ideas Little Pictures

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Yak shaving

Yak shaving explained: someone looks on confused as another explains the convoluted story which led to them sitting there shaving a yak, just like solving problems in software development

Yak shaving describes how when setting out to do something, you found you had to first do something else, which needed you to finish this other thing, and so on until you found yourself shaving a yak, or equally unrelated activity, to do the first thing you set out to do.

It's pretty frequent in life — tidying your room? — and particularly resonates in software development, where when tackling one thing, you often find yourself fixing something else, which needs you to fix something else, and so on. Here's the ever brilliant xkcd on fixing problems .

Yak shaving features, lovingly polished, in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures.

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