tags: #public #engineering
- I came across the concept of yak shaving in Drew DeVault’s blog post.
- Yak shaving is a pointless activity that solves a problem, that solves another problem, that solves another problem and after several recursion later solves the actual problem.
- The most common example of this is you trying to fix a bug in an open source library that you use in one your our projects.
- Most developers stop after they find a big a third party library and give up.
- But that’s not what you should do. Developers are paid to solve problems. And it’s your responasbility to solve the problem no matter what. If that means fixing a bug in the GCC compiler or creating a PR in a NPM project so be it.
- Some of the best engineers I have met are very good at this process.
- I have seen them creating PRs in all kind of libraries without waiting for the maintainer to fix the problem.