Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/Yak
Yak shaving day/Yak shaving week is a quarterly deep work mini offsite for the release engineering team.
🇩🇰 Skald's Yak Shaving Lore[edit]
Hwæt the Release Engineering team in days gone by
and the managers that coached them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of their brave campaigns…
📖 Definitions[edit]
- Yak Shaving
- "yak shaving is what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task."[1]
- Yak Shaving Day/Week/Month/Year
- A mini developer-driven quarterly offsite where we cancel meetings and focus on deep (and often neglected) work as a team
🐃 Yaktributes[edit]
- Yaktributes
- Portmanteau "Yak" and "Attributes"
A good yak (task for a yak shaving day/week/month/year). See our Yak shaving workboard on phab.
- Is obtainable within the allotted yak shaving window
- Has few external dependencies; i.e., if it's obvious you'd be blocked waiting for another team or individual not participating in the yak shave: probably best to avoid (unless that's the scope -- get to the blocker point)
- Is not a quarterly goal, necessarily -- don't feel obligated to work on quarterly goals unless that's what your heart most desires
- Is Self contained. If it's a small idea with a big potential impact that you're excited to work on: perfect
BONUS: Work with each other if you're into that. Shared hacking time is fun (for some...I hope 🥺)