Hal fixing a light bulb (from Malcolm in the Middle S03E06 - Health Scare)

If you're yak-shaving correctly, you're laying the groundwork for future tasks. If you do it incorrectly, it's more like Malcolm's dad [1], who is distracted by subtasks that are only minimally related to the initial goal. Devs get the two mixed up quite often. Usually on Monday mornings... 1. [VIDEO]

> The father of the first user, who while everyone was discussing, went to the shop and bought the cheapest lightbulb. Of course it doesn't end there: [VIDEO] (lightbulb scene from Malcolm in the Middle).

Relevant Malcolm in the Middle "Hal Replaces a Lightbulb" video. Sometimes I feel like this is my life. [VIDEO]

This is incomplete without talking a bit about when the inner loop starts to feel more like a call stack. [VIDEO]

The frustrating thing isn't the small problems, in chasing these small problems one might find a big one that isn't as easy to fix: [VIDEO]

This short scene from Malcolm in the Middle is the best explanation I've found of ADHD as an adult: [VIDEO] He tries to turn on the light, the bulb is dead, unscrews it, then as he's getting the bulb the shelf in the cabinet it's in is loose. He gets a screwdriver to fix the cabinet, but the rails on the drawer the screwdriver's in are squeaky. He gets some WD-40 to fix that, but the can of WD-40 is empty. He then gets in the car, which refuses to start. Then his wife gets home, and he's underneath the car covered in motor oil. "Hal, did you replace that light bulb in the kitchen?" "WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE I'M DOING?!".

It's a stretch, but I can imagine it happening to someone! Reminds me of Hal fixing a light bulb (from Malcolm in the Middle): [VIDEO] Thanks for sharing.

We started with plain Docker Compose files (one container for our project, others for DB, Spark, Airflow, etc.). For more experienced, full-time developers this setup was good enough (though it required a few extra steps after `docker compose up`). But it still showed significant friction for (a) very junior developers (b) non technical business people who wanted to code. Generally the same folks that would need help installing PostGIS on their machines, etc. People just wanted to merge some cool ideas into our codebases and now they needed to learn wtf Docker and Docker Compose are[1]. That was a huge time waster. Devcontainers are neatly integrated into VS Code's UI, so they solved the "last mile" problem of allowing non-tech folks to use containers. [1] [VIDEO]

> I've updated my iPad, fixed the leg on a tripod, cut the grass, cleaned the mower, scrubbed the driveway. Guess how much progress I made on the side project? Hal fixes a light bulb: [VIDEO] a huge cold brew with extra espresso helps me focus i guess the focus comes about because the caffeine helps me realize that the little 'side-side quests' are actually meaningless, making the 'real quest' actually attainable (since now there's no 'worthless' things to occupy my time)

If anybody's using it like that, it's totally lost its meaning. The whole concept is that sometimes to get result A you have to a total laundry list of seemingly unrelated tasks to clear the way. This scene[1] from Malcolm in the Middle almost illustrates it perfectly except it's more Hal getting distracted on side quests that were spawned because he tried to change a light bulb... [1] [VIDEO]

I've always considered this Malcolm in the Middle scene to perfectly explain Yak Shaving (a number of years before Yak Shaving was a thing). [VIDEO] But as you mentioned, No Yaks included however

Find out their frame of reference, look for comparable concepts in the real world. For technical debt, this scene from Malcolm in the Middle (S03E06) [VIDEO] might be a good comparison. If you refuse to explain relevant concepts to your PM, as a neighbouring commentor suggests, that increases the knowledge gap between you (or your team) and the PM. I think it's in the best interest of both the team and the PM that they have a shared understanding of what happens within a project. On the other hand, if the PM is not interested in any of those details, that is a sign that they might not be a good fit in that part of the organisation.

This story is a good opportunity to post one of my favorite clips from Malcolm in the Middle (42 seconds): [VIDEO]

> I've often thought about that when there's a work crisis: If I'm the second on the scene, what can I do to support those fighting the fire right now, before jumping in. A lot of it depends on the size and skill-set of your team and the escalation routes available to you, but in general (and off the top of my head): - Get the first people on scene to give a summary of the problem as they know it. Make sure everyone actually agrees on what the problem is and what symptoms have been observed. Understand what areas people are currently investigating and make sure they aren't trampling over each other or actually making the situation worse [1] - Make sure the situation hasn't evolved whilst the first on scene have been investigating the initial symptoms. It's easy to get lost in the weeds digging into a handful of monitoring alerts only to look up and realise there's now 300 and the original problem is only a small part of what's going on. - If there isn't one already and you're not better doing something else, become incident commander. When done right it's an extremely important and useful role. - Take over external communication and protect the team from distractions - Start assessing escalation options - Take copious notes and keep a timeline - Act as a shared memory and keep people honest - Have a less panicked, wider (non minutia) view of the problem - Start collating and pulling up documentation/schematics so the people at the coalface can quickly query it rather than get

> maybe all this should just be thrown away and we should invent an FS with ACID semantics. You're describing WinFS, which looked into and ultimately abandoned Microsoft 20 years ago. I'm sure other groups have looked into this as well, but there's no such thing as free lunch. > I'm all for gradual improvements but at one point and on we should zoom even further out and pick our battles well. That sounds a lot like picking up more battles, yet we all still have 24 hours a day. Recursively trying to perfect lower layers will have you like Hal changing the lightbulb [VIDEO]

(Non short video format - [VIDEO] ... When in the office I had a QR code of that so people could scan it and understand what I was working on)

This is significant semantic drift from the original meaning of yak shaving. Building your own is great, but it's not yak shaving. Yak shaving is fixing fractal brokenness that you notice while punching through layers of existing systems to finally fix the root cause of the original thing you cared about. See, e.g. Hal replacing a lightbulb: [VIDEO]

I sometimes feel like Hal changing a lightbulb[1] when I'm trying to install an app on Linux, either I don't have the correct distro, I need to enter km long command line to add some repository to apt, I need to download 346 packages from I don't know where to the build the app, and finally find out that it's not what I wanted. Yes, I know that's how Linux works and I know all the advantages of that, but when you see now that many install are just 'curl mywebsite.com/install.sh | bash', you start to wonder which is a "good" solution. 1. [VIDEO]