#yakshaving

[julia-geiser]

Illustrationen für The Economist, 1843 Magazine, "Brave new Word": https://www.economist.com/1843/2021/02/15/from-doomscrolling-to-zombie-boxes-a-guide-to-screen-time-slang

[utf]

via 0ver

[phrasewise]

Flat tire…no big deal. Three tubes later…the front wheel is changed. One tube was in the little “just in case” bag under the saddle. They have a tough life banging around in there. Second tube felt cheap and had also been sitting around. OK, so it took way longer than I expected. The back tube had also not been changed in a while, figured I’d try and beat Murphy at his own game and change it too. Hmm, what’s this? Something had rubbed the rubber off the tire for about a foot of wheel. I have no idea what or when. New rubber ordered. This is called “yak shaving.” I hope I’m done for now. I still need a new helmet (another argument like politics, guns, sharpening I don’t mean to have. There are places where I ride where it’s required. I have friends on all sides. Let’s leave it there.) I also need new shoes. It’s all gonna wait. #murphybepraised #circumstancemanor #itsnotflatitsjusttired #cyclethis #yakshaving https://www.instagram.com/p/CTQkq0wja4m/?utm_medium=tumblr

[phrasewise]

Eclectic collection of this evenings efforts both to do and then #cleanallthethings #circumstancemanor #therewasmore #itsworsethanitappears #yakshaving #yakshavingthenightaway

[robustcornhusk]

i had a couple of habits that i was trying to change, unsuccessfully: i hardly ever swept or vacuumed at our old apartment; i hated taking out the trash; our bathroom sink was constantly littered with my garbage; i always put off doing my injection; i never put baking dishes away; my room was always a mess...

i did a step or two of troubleshooting for most of these problems: we replaced the vacuum with a cordless one, we moved the baking dishes from the nitemare cabinet to an open shelf, i switched from harpoon needles to subcutaneous. 

but i still rarely did the things i was supposed to do, so i thought it must be that i’m just lazy.

we moved two months ago, so it’s unclear how much is me being on my best behavior still, but i’m vacuuming at least once a week, taking out the garbage at all, the bathroom sink is pretty clean, my injection is never more than a day late, the baking dishes are neatly stacked, our room is much cleaner.

it’s weird: i’ve confirmed with cohumans that it seems we’re spending less time cleaning, but the space is baseline-neater than it used to be.

floor differences: we have literally a larger living room, so i can move all the furniture to one side and vacuum under and then move it back and vacuum under and then put it back. we got some area rugs to dampen our noise, so instead of vacuuming the entire floor, i’m just vacuuming the rugs. there’s an outlet next to where we keep the cordless vacuum, so i don’t have to plan ahead to charge it.

trash: there are no automatically locking doors in between me and the garbage bins. there is no broken glass in the garage.

bathroom: instead of a large, beautiful, spacious bathroom with no storage, we have a very tiny one with a medicine cabinet and some shallow drawers under the sink. instead of having to dig for my injection stuff, it’s all laid out, ready to go, in one of said shallow drawers.

kitchen: the baking dishes used to be at the floor, and i had to squeeze behind a table to get to them, and crouch, and i didn’t have enough room to face them. now they are a little below eye height, with no obstructing furniture.

bedroom: it’s maybe half the size of our old bedroom, and doesn’t have meaningful closets, so we got wardrobes. everything has a place now, in a drawer or on a shelf or on a hanger, behind a shut door, and yet is easily accessible (unlike our old L-shaped closet). 

other changes: i’m eating both more regularly and better, for certain values of better (soylent ~2 meals/day, a multipart cooked meal daily); cohuman and i are exercising regularly; i am taking my adhd medication most days. i am not sure if these are side-effects, causes, or both.

it’s weird. i had thought that the obstacles i’d come up, that were blocking me from doing this things, were made up, fake: i must just be lazy. but i took the obstacles away, and suddenly, i am doing the things. 

[nicdevera]

Ok looking at Conduit, Picasa websync, Shotwell plugins

[cloudnative]

> Your smarts are now measured differently: by the outcomes your produce, by the discipline you bring to your team.

[al-the-x]

Running a regular Coding Dojo without a lot of Yak Shaving...

I gained a lot of experience back in 2010 by helping my buddy Caike launch the OrlandoDojo. We kept the fun going for almost a year and a half before having to call it quits on our regular-like-clockwork, every-other-Saturday dojo sessions.

Nonetheless, one of the pain points we discovered early on was in setting up the boilerplate for each of the dojos. For those who aren’t familiar, the rules of the dojo are pretty simple:

Pick a Problem: Project Euler, Daily Programmer, and CodeKatas are a good start. Despite what Uncle Bob might say, avoid bowling.

Pick a Language: It’s always fun to try a tried-and-true problem in a new language but make sure there are some people on hand that understand the language you pick; i.e. know it well enough to solve the problem already.

Pick an Implementation: This is where things get interesting. In the aforementioned attempts at bowling, all we managed to uncover in two hours is that no one knows how to actually score bowling. That information has apparently been lost to the droids. However, discussing the problem and its implementation led to some interesting places.

There are some additional rules to help control the fun, as my A-type friends like to say: red-green-refactor (there’s a hat for that), pair programming (pilot-copilot), just to name a few. However, we found that after all the discussion, we ended up killing a reasonable chunk of time just setting up the environment for us to start writing tests! Total buzz kill!

I’ll have my yak pre-shaved, please.

Eventually, I started capturing our setup routine and pushing it into a Github repo... Mostly because I’m lazy. Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of value in demonstrating the testing setup and that ran the tests auto-magically for us while we happily coded away. That 30 minute interruption, though, really choked the momentum, and we found ourselves asking more than once, "So, uh, what were we gonna build?"

That, as I said, was 2011, and we haven’t had a regular dojo since. I still run occasional dojos at the OrlandoPHP user group when I don’t have a speaker lined up, and I hope to get some Coding Dojo groups started up at the local colleges one day. The state of the dojo union is not strong in Orlando at the moment, and my old environment setup was looking a little dated.

Now with more Future!

Being a (somewhat) proactive sort, I decided to update my toolchain a bit. I don’t currently use watchr anymore, as it was deprecated a while ago. Most of the Rails folks are using the heavily-integrated-with-Rails guard gem, and the gazr gem replaced my old friend for Ruby >= 1.9.3, it seems.

As I’ve made a transition to more JavaScript tools, I’ve taken up the use of ~~Grunt and grunt-contrib-watch plugin~~ (EDIT: I'm all about the gulp these days, which has file-watching built right in) to "just do things" when a file changes. Y’know, like when I want to re-run all my tests… Or just the one for the corresponding file… Wait, this sounds familiar.

So I picked up my old xUnit Environments repo on Github again and refactored mercilessly! The result is a simple, one command method of running tests for four different languages — PHP, Python, Ruby, and Javascript — whenever a file change event occurs and some decently modern boilerplate for running tests with the built-in testing facilities, where possible (PHP is still a notable exception), e.g. unittest in Python and Test::Unit in Ruby. (EDIT: Yes, I know simpletest now... Time for more updates!)

You’re welcome.

I know, I know. Those are probably NOT the tools you’re used to using: “Where’s RSpec?” you cry, “Ever heard of Jasmine? What, no BDD?” Yes, yes, I’ve heard of all of those things, and if you want to use them in your dojos, you probably know how to fork repos and install gems and customize the ever-loving snot out of this tiny kernel of an idea that I pieced together so that I didn’t have to do so much yak shaving every other week when I gave up my Saturday to teach people how to write test-driven code.

Now you can skip that tiny chunk of yak-shaving, too.